Everything Is True, Nothing Is Permitted / Kendell Geers

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Everything Is True, Nothing Is Permitted

Spotlight on the new exhibition curated by Kendell Geers in collaboration with A/POLITICAL

This year marks the centenary of the first Surrealist Manifesto. Its author André Breton was explicit that Surrealism was fundamentally a revolutionary movement. In the second Surrealist Manifesto Breton said that “The simplest Surrealist act consists of dashing down into the street, pistol in hand, and firing blindly, as fast as you can pull the trigger, into the crowd.” A century later the unlikely Avant Garde act of firing a gun into a crowd has become so commonplace that it is hardly even noticed. What is the function of art in a world confronted by climate change in which protesters throw soup or glue themselves to works of art ? How is it possible to sustain any definition of Performance Art in a world in which people are setting themselves on fire or in which naked protestors are silenced by the algorithm ? What is the function of the image when nipples are forbidden but there are no limitations on images of death, misery, abuse and poverty? The exhibition also addresses contemporary crises — from political extremism to cultural erasure — highlighting how narratives of “truth” are weaponised in modern society. The title itself becomes a commentary on this condition: when everything claims to be true, nothing can be trusted.

“Everything Is True, Nothing Is Permitted” is a thought-provoking exhibition curated by South African artist Kendell Geers. Known for his uncompromising approach to art and politics, Geers brings together a diverse range of artists whose works blur the lines between fact and fiction, belief and skepticism, order and anarchy. “Everything Is True, Nothing Is Permitted” cuts across the divide between underground and mainstream with the pressing question: what is the role of art in a world increasingly divided by aesthetic violence and political extremism ? It is a protest and a celebration that calls into question the divisions that separate art from activism, beauty from brutality, truth from expression and stands against an industry terrified of truth. The exhibition design pays homage to the spirit of the original Dada and early Surrealist exhibitions and looks more like a punk squat than a white cube. Housed in a former industrial complex in Rotterdam, Brutus is itself a direct challenge to the conventions of the global art world. Its rough, unfinished walls, cavernous halls, and unpredictable spatial arrangements resist the neutralising effect of the white cube. Here, art cannot be isolated from the world outside — it bleeds into the architecture, into the history of the space, and into the psyche of the viewer.

“Art cannot be isolated from the world outside — it bleeds into the architecture, into the history of the space, and into the psyche of the viewer”

Marina-Abramovic_Art_Must_be_Beautiful

Mandy El Sayegh Akathisia-2023

Johan-Grimonprez-Cover-Looking-for-Alfred

Unlike conventional galleries designed to elevate art into luxury objects, Brutus embraces its gritty materiality — a gesture that aligns perfectly with Geers’ vision. The exhibition becomes an anti-gallery, a site where meaning emerges from tension, not from polished presentation. In a moment where global biennials and fairs increasingly dictate artistic value based on market trends, “Everything Is True, Nothing Is Permitted” reminds us of art’s capacity to be a tool of resistance — not just another luxury good.
Walking through the exhibition, one senses that Geers has constructed a kind of modern ritual space — a site where art is an invocation, a spell, a weapon. The artists assembled refuse to play the game of visibility and market success. Their works evoke danger, sacredness, and rebellion — an antidote to the market-friendly spectacle that dominates so much of contemporary art.
Rather than creating a seamless viewing experience, the show forces its visitors to navigate discomfort. It breaks down the illusion that art should be pleasing, quiet, or apolitical — a stance that speaks directly against the sanitised environments of elite galleries and institutions. Borrowing its title from a subversion of the famed Sufi saying “Nothing is true, everything is permitted” (popularised in Western thought via Nietzsche and later counterculture), the exhibition grapples with the collapse of meaning in a post-truth era — where every truth is contested, and every lie might masquerade as fact.
Geers, an artist long known for his radical stance against institutional and market-driven art systems, has curated an exhibition that is less about aesthetics and more about rupture — a call to rethink what art can be when stripped of its commercial value and market validation.

“The show forces its visitors to navigate discomfort”

InextinguishableFire_Cassils_SPILL_festival_national_theater_london_UK_11082015_manuel_vason_073_ COURTESY A_POLITICAL

Cassils Inextinguishable Fire, Rehearsal, 2021 Photo: Manuel Vason Courtesy of the Artist and A/POLITICAL

spirit_in_any_condition - Marina Abramovic

Piss-Christ-1987-Series-Immersions-Andres-Serrano.-Courtesy-of-the-Artist-and-APOLITICAL

At its core, “Everything Is True, Nothing Is Permitted” is a manifesto against the corruption of meaning in both art and society. By stripping art of its market function and refusing to offer the polished surfaces of the white cube, Geers and Brutus challenge us to ask: What remains of art when you take away its price tag? The exhibition is both a protest and a defiant celebration of the power of art to challenge, inspire, heal, excite, tease, disturb, confuse, and provoke our expectations. It is an uncompromising stand against the glitter and gloss of an art market terrified of the enormous social, political, and economic challenges that define our everyday reality.
Rather than offering neat conclusions, the exhibition demands active engagement from its viewers. It’s an invitation to question one’s own assumptions, to see beyond surface appearances, and to confront the chaos and complexity of contemporary life. As Geers himself has often argued, art is not a place for comfort — it is a site of struggle, where meaning is fought for and never guaranteed.

At the exhibition entrance a warning sign sums it up – Most of the artists in this exhibition have suffered for their work one way or another. Many have been censored, persecuted, imprisoned, or exiled for their gender, race, sexuality, politics or transgressive and defiant artistic expression. Every single artist has at some point found themselves condemned for refusing to conform or make their art more acceptable to the conventions of an art market that thrives on the banality of ornament. This exhibition is not about beauty, comfort, or entertainment. It is about an unshakable belief in art’s power to inspire hope in the face of adversity. Many of the works you will encounter might be considered shocking by people who have never suffered for their art, or persecuted for their identity and so mistake the resilient scream of artists to be a provocation.
If you believe in art that screams out against silence, oppression and complacency, then enter at your own risk to discover the world as artists see it. Be warned however that you may not leave quite the same as you entered because Art Changes the World – ONE Perception at a Time !

Fixation (Video, 2013)- Piotr Pavlenski

Valie Export Action Pants: Genital Panic, 1969