Working across photography, video, and installation, South African artist Berni Searle explores the relationships between identity, race, and themes of displacement and loss. Searle often employs her body, which she transforms through processes of covering, mixing, or trace-making.
Read MoreThe indeterminate nature of identity is central to Berni Searle's work. 'Colour Me' (1998–2000), one of Searle's earliest works, is a self-portrait series of the artist lying on her back, covered in differently coloured spices. The iconic Untitled (Red) (1998) shows Searle tilting her head towards the camera, the whites and blacks of her eyes drawing contrast to the red spice that covers her skin and mouth.
Searle deliberately adopts different skin colours in 'Colour Me' to renegotiate her identity. As the artist told Manchester Art Gallery in 2019, identity was 'imposed or created for' her when she was growing up in South Africa as a person of mixed ethnicities.
Searle similarly reinvents herself in the video Snow White (2001), which begins with flour and water dripping onto her naked body. Once coated in a layer of white material, the artist begins to gather the mixture on her skin and knead it into dough.
In About to forget, her solo exhibition at Cape Town's Stevenson Gallery in 2005, Berni Searle explored experiences of intergenerational loss and memory. Drawing from black-and-white family photographs, Searle recreated their silhouettes in red paper cut-outs and placed them in water. This process resulted in the prints By the river (traces) and On either side (both 2005). In them, the human forms of the cut-outs appear to blur and unravel, becoming lost in a mist of red, in reference to the separation of her family members due to religious differences and state-sanctioned racial classification.
Following the Marikana massacre of 2012, in which South African police killed 34 miners engaged in a nationwide strike, Berni Searle created In Wake Of (2014). The artist represents herself as a corpse, covered in black coal dust and laid on a black cloth. Against the darkness of the image, a collection of gold coins shines in her right hand, serving as a reminder of the economic discrepancies between migrant workers and miner owners, who benefit by exploiting the former.
Bernie Searle holds a BFA (1987) and MFA (1995) from the Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town, where she currently teaches as Associate Professor.
Berni Searle has exhibited internationally, holding solo exhibitions that include MANTLE, Richard Saltoun Gallery (online) (2021); Refuge, La Galerie Particulière, Paris (2013); Black Smoke Rising Trilogy, Ron Mandos Gallery, Amsterdam (2012); Shimmer, Stevenson Gallery, Cape Town (2011); and Across Oceans, Transit Art Space and Day for Night, Stavanger, Norway (2009).
Selected group exhibitions include Made Routes: Mapping and Making, Richard Saltoun Gallery, London (2021); Earth Matters, National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C. (2014); Public Intimacy: Art and Other Ordinary Acts in South Africa, Yerba Buena Centre for the Arts (YBCA) and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), California (2014); Variations, Mendel Art Gallery, Saskatoon, Canada (2011); Pictures by Women: A History of Modern Photography, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York (2011).
Searle has shown her work in international biennials including the Venice Biennale (2005, 2001); the Cairo Biennale (1998); and the Johannesburg Biennale (1997).
Sherry Paik | Ocula | 2021
