Berni Searle (Artist research)

Artist research:

Name: Berni Searle

Where are they from and where are they now:

• born 7 July 1964

• South African artist who works with photography, video, and film to produce lens-based installations that stage narratives connected to history, memory, and place.

• Searle lives and works in Cape Town and is currently Associate Professor at the Michaelis School of Fine Art at the University of Cape Town.

Artwork (for each relevant piece):

1. Name of work:

1. What is it, and what is it made of:

• Later Searle made the move to utilise large scale digital photographic prints and found materials to make installations. She uses time-based media such as photography, video and film as a tool to capture her work with performative narratives and the self as a figure to embody history, land-memory and place. Besides dealing with South African History, awareness of her own skin and of those around her has been a recurring theme in her work,

• Two 1998 works from her ''Color Me'' series show her face or body covered with turmeric, paprika or clove. The Indian spice trade, which depended on South African ports and black laborers, seems to be the theme here, but the effect is slick and one-dimensional, with the political meanings tacked on. Three close-ups of the artist's spice-covered head are glamorous enough to be in Vogue.

1. Image:

série Seeking Refuge - Flight, 2008

• Archival pigment ink on cotton rag paper Edition of 5 ex + 2 AP

1. What does it mean/represent:

• This aversion to being strictly categorized or placed into a specific box is apparent in the complex layers of Searle’s work; characterised by a desire to belong, yet not to be reduced to simply one thing or another. She is concerned with the complexities of identity and belonging in relation to language, race, colour, gender and the History of South Africa.

• Her work embodies not only her physical self but the physicality of the landscape and the memory that it holds. Her use of the body in performances references a postmodern tradition that started with artists such as Ana Mendieta. Unlike Mendieta, who often creates traces of violent scenes, Searle, uses the memory of the land to become part of her body.

• Berni Searle does not take the viewer to a monument or a place that one can completely recognize. The specificity of the location is often too surreal to be pinpointed. The landscapes show no traces of human life except for her presence. The colour, the coating, hiding, emerging and covering, as well as the mountain, the ocean and the air convey a desire to stay in that her body gives the gesture and posture of rooting or connection to that place.

• Searle in fact questions the very basis of identity by asserting the self as endlessly fluid, indeterminate and complex, always involved in a never-ending process of becoming. Read this way Searle's art is less about identity politics such as race for instance, than about the lifelong process of coming to terms with the estrangement that is the soul of identity.

1. Connection to culture:

• Originally working as a sculptor, she produced a worked titled Illusions of Identity Notions of Nationhood for her Masters degree. In a conversation with Kathryn Smith in 2000, Searle suggested that this work “dealt with issues around nationalisms and nationhood in the face of a rapidly transforming culture. It laid the foundations for [her] explorations into an 'unfixed' conception of 'identity', and the creation of ambiguous spaces in which to consider these issues.”

1. Connection to collonialism:

• Berni Searle is no newcomer to issues of identity. Often her works are insistently read in terms of racial identity, an interpretation certainly invited by titles such as Discoloured, Colour me, Colour matters, A darker shade of light, Off-White and Snow White, but one that also seems to arrest her work in a certain place and time, specifically that of apartheid South Africa where she grew up categorised as coloured.

• Berni Searle explores her own and a broader South African identity in Profile, which presents eight photographic prints of the artist's face impressed with graphic symbols. These allude to the history of colonialism and apartheid and the contrasts of Black/White, European/Middle Eastern, Muslim/Catholic and European/African. They include a cross, a rakam (Muslim prayer), a British imperial crown, an apartheid-era shield, an African beadwork panel, a Dutch windmill and cloves that refer to the spice trade that led the Dutch to colonize the Cape and brought Searle's ancestors to work there in indentured servitude.

1. Critique/response to artwork:

1. Artist further/other work/development:

1. Sources:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berni_Searle

• http://www.sahistory.org.za/people/berni-searle

• http://www.lagalerieparticuliere.com/en/artistes/presentation/13280/berni-searle#oeuv-1

• https://africa.si.edu/exhibits/textures/full-searle.html

• http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/12/arts/art-in-review-berni-searle.html

1. What I have learnt:

• Don’t catagorise myself, accept the differences but still have that desire to belong, finding a place.

• Strong connection to place but does not have to be specific.

• If talking about yourself – use yourself (imagery). Also can be used to present a group of people in your same situation