The name Kendell Geers appears in some of the world’s finest art publications — primarily because the artist’s work has begun to appear in the world’s top galleries. International curators have begun to take some sort of stand on Geers’s politically inspired actions that attempt, in instances, to unravel how the social distinctions in post-apartheid South Africa operate.Geers has referred to himself as a “con artist”. In the lavish international art publication Cream: Contemporary Art in Culture there is a short chapter on Geers in which curator Hou Hanru refers to him as, “not simply an artist. He is an activist par excellence.” What follows is a bit of overkill about Geers “publicly refusing to serve in the South African Defence Force during apartheid. He was forced into exile.” This sort of standard rhetoric, employed by foreign critics looking at South Africa, plays into the hands of the artist who has paraded post-apartheid oddities as fine art. At the world’s most prestigious art expo, the Documenta XI in Kassel last year, Geers showed a series of photographs of security arrangements around South African homes. Having lived abroad for a few years, Geers now returns (albeit only to exhibit) with a show called The Prodigal Son — a rather self-aggrandising title. Here Geers combines local and global issues relating to security: there is a video work showing the World Trade Centre (WTC) attack in slow motion, backwards; and his series on security fencing. Geers has also shredded pornographic magazines that lie on the ground in an undefined heap. This is on sale for more than R100 000.Your pieces that deal with potential violence in Johannesburg — or the threat to wealth — like picturing security arrangements in suburbia would certainly function differently to a foreign audience than a local one (foreigners may, in fact, be horrified!). Locally, though, we feel the images tend to do little more than aestheticise through repetition. Is this an intentionally Warholesque maneuver: to trivialise what’s severe (in South Africa now)? Or are you encountering a meaning problem as the work transfers?I am very aware of the fact that my “suburbia” series has entirely different meanings in South Africa than they would somewhere else in the world. In fact, for many South Africans they don’t make sense at all because of their banality and that’s where the work of art begins. When I took photographs some years ago it was more about trying to understand how the concepts of paranoia, fear, safety and security are communicated. The signs and symbols used do not really stop anybody from breaking into a home as much as make the people living there feel “safe”. I also wanted to document the language of these concepts in a specific moment in time because they change as people and their paranoia changes. In fact many of the “signs” in the photographs have since changed as companies have merged or gone out of business. Regarding the conflict between the local and the global, it is my intention to work very precisely within a local framework as an attempt to resist international languages and structures. The Johannesburg suburbia is different from the Hollywood soap opera version and it was my home when I took the photographs, thus I was trying to use my personal experience as a form of resistance. I work with signs of violence not to trivialise or aestheticise it, but rather to contaminate the banality of the international art languages.Matthew saw your work in Perth in 2001 where you placed a list of crimes happening in South Africa into backlit bus stops. Is it problematic to you that the work may have been read by expatriate South Africans as a reinforcement of why they left South Africa in the first place (a sort of liberal to right-wing collusion between artist and audience)?I don’t think that the right wing go to art galleries or even understand works of art that are slightly more complex than charging elephants. I decided to show that particular piece in Perth (and also in London) because of the colonial tradition of naming, whereby places like Melville, Rosebank, Kensington, Hyde Park can be found all over the world. So if you read one sentence about a crime committed in Kensington or Melville you could be mistaken for thinking that it was in Perth or London. The work was an attempt on my part to try to understand how language functions in terms of communicating extreme emotions. How does one describe the indescribable? How do you speak about the unmentionable ? I am happy that you even noticed the work and thought about the context because that means that the contamination process whereby art and reality get all confused and mixed up is important. Had I presented a classical, stupid, conceptual art text in the same bus stops I am sure that nobody would have noticed, let alone still remembered it all these years later.In the video work of the Twin Towers attack you have created with Patrick Codenys we see yet another image of 9/11 that, quite frankly, we feel needs little re-exposure. So familiar is it that it has lost most if not all of its horror appeal. Is it your intention to further aestheticise the horror by playing it backwards, slowly?Yes, you could say that it was “yet another image of 9/11” or you could say that it was our attempt to work with an iconic image as a subject and media object. With most of my work I use a system of repetition and duplication to understand the limits of an image, a text or an object. The repetition functions on the one hand as a way of collapsing meaning, of making something banal, like the suburbia photographs. On the other hand, if you insist on continuing the process even after the meaning has been lost, then the sounds and meanings change again in the manner of a mantra. I am not saying that we managed to turn the 9/11 image into a mantra, but I do think that if you watch it from the beginning and not from halfway through, the image is reanimated and reignited because it’s only at the end that you even realise that its the WTC image. Finally I would have to admit that the image is indeed very beautiful in as much as it can be reduced to an image.This is not the reality of the WTC collapsing but the reverse and it’s your own memory, emotions and preconceived ideas that code and colour your reading of the image. I wanted to see if it was possible to work with an image so known, perhaps now even more famous than the Mona Lisa, and to still manage to make it my own.The wrapped sculptures have a painterliness in the way in which the tape is used. The scorched earth photographs have something of an abstract painting about them. Is this the return of the aesthetic in your work?I think that my work has not changed at all. There was always an aesthetic component to it but it was never beautiful. It’s like the attraction repulsion you feel at the scene of a crime or an accident. They say that absence makes the heart grow fonder and perhaps in my absence, my work has found a more receptive audience. I for one have not forgotten that the wrapped chevron technique dates back to an exhibition I had at the Everard Read Contemporary and also the Durban Technikon in 1993.The Prodigal Son appears to be a collection of what remains of previous collections. Is it true to say that you’ve arrived home bearing unsold remainders of your other exhibitions?The video works of the Red Sniper project premiered at the Georges Pompidou in Paris only two weeks before the opening in Johannesburg. The [sculpture of an] 18-carat golden matchstick was made in Johannesburg specifically for the show because I wanted to use South African gold. In fact, only the locks and the photographs have previously been shown on other exhibitions, but they have never been seen in South Africa. Moreover the two neons will be used for an exhibition at the Migros museum in Zurich in June. Given the proximity in work and dates between the Goodman Gallery, the Pompidou and the Migros museum I would say that not only do you have your facts wrong but that I made South Africa a priority.