Kendell Geers curator of Everything is true - nothing is permitted believes in the power of art because " Art changes the world - one perception at a time!" The exhibition that will take place from 8 March to 15 June 2025 at Brutus in Rotterdam, presents highly explosive works by artists including Marina Abramovic, Cassils, Regina José Galindo, Kara Walker, Edith Dekyndt, Santiago Sierra, Selma Selman, Gilbert and George, Arthur Jafa, Alfredo Jaar.

Everything is true - nothing is permitted is a protest come celebration. It is a provocative celebration of art's power to subvert our expectations, inspire, heal, excite, confuse, disrupt and challenge. At the same time, it is an uncompromising protest against the glitz and glamour of an art market that reduces art's value to mere finance.

Everything is true - nothing is permitted revolves around the resilience of real artists who refuse to accept their role as a lifestyle decorator or producer of alternative assets. They sink their teeth into police violence, virulent racism, suffocating beauty ideals, power inequality and capitalist excesses. Without moralising, they demonstrate what art can be: a language to contain the contemporary world's madness, stress and trauma.

Curator Kendell Geers was persecuted in South Africa in the 1980s as an anti-apartheid activist and has since lived as a political refugee in exile. This awards him a direct understanding of the painful overlap between art and politics. For Everything is true - nothing is permitted he invited artists such as Nadya Tolokonnikova (Pussy Riot), Steven Cohen, Betty Tompkins, Andres Serrano, Valie Export, Oleg Kulig and Pyotr Pavlensky who have resisted censorship in a world divided by prejudice. Many of the artists in this exhibition have been persecuted or imprisoned because of their work.

Brutus in Rotterdam is Geers' dream location for Everything is true - nothing is permitted as it's not a slick white cube, but a raw space that sharpens the senses. Works will be printed directly onto walls, among the rust stains and peeling paint, so visitors view images, not artworks as commodities. The punk aesthetic of the exhibition's design evokes associations with the avant-garde exhibitions of a century ago with which Dadaists and Surrealists rebelled against the coquettish art of the Parisian salons.

From storming the capitol to sewn-up lips

Everything is true - nothing is permitted contains old and new work by some 80 international artists. The works make you think about the thin line between 'freedom fighter' and 'terrorist' as well as the power contained in the right to speak. The art is sometimes intense, often ambiguous and always confusing. In an era in which the boundary between facts and perception is increasingly blurred, the work of, for example Andres Serrano, Arthur Jafa and Johan Grimonprez, invites us to navigate beyond the contradictions of a post-truth reality. Their films that refer to historical events including the storming of the Capitol, the murder of George Floyd and the attack on the World Trade Center, offer surprising interpretations of these events and question how these images relate to historical facts.

Everything is true - nothing is permitted is not about conventional aesthetics hijacked by the art market. Here, art does not have to be beautiful and comforting. This exhibition is about the violence of aesthetics. The way Marina Abramović combs her hair in Art must be beautiful, artists must be beautiful (1975) looks painful and causes discomfort. However, as an artist who has experienced exclusion and censorship herself, she has a very different idea of the relationship between beauty and violence. The same goes for David Wojnarowicz who - two years before his death of AIDS - sewed his lips shut in protest of the government's silence about the epidemic. By making it impossible for himself to speak, he screams. This photo Silence = death is a fitting campaign image for the exhibition: it shows how artists find ways to speak, even when they are censored.

15 live performances

Everything is true - nothing is permitted invites visitors to view reality through the eyes of artists who suffered for their art, gender and identity and transformed that suffering into the most resilient definition of humanity. The exhibition poses the pressing question: what is the role of art in a world increasingly divided by aesthetic violence and political extremism?

In the latter, our skin is the final frontier and our senses have become a battlefield. As such, the exhibition focuses on the human body using photography, video, installations and performances. When language becomes detached from meaning and is twisted into a weapon of mass distraction, we can only rely on our own flesh and bone. What is left of art history in an age of AI, deepfakes and an image-saturated fashion industry with unlimited production budgets aimed at distraction and entertainment?

In addition to videos and photos of existing performances, 15 works will be performed live. Two of them by Mandy El-Sayegh and Regina José Galindo were created especially for this exhibition.

From the collection of A/political

A number of the works exhibited in Everything is true - nothing is permitted come from the A/political collection. This organisation, with offices in London and a huge industrial space (The Foundry) in the south of France, acts as a platform for artists who have difficulty gaining a foothold at mainstream art institutions due to the controversial nature of their work. In recent years, A/political has co-facilitated the 'impossible' projects of artists such as Santiago Sierra, Laibach and Bruce LaBruce. It also cooperated closely and successfully with WikiLeaks to secure the release of Julian Assange.