Berni Searle is an artist who works with photography, video, and film to produce lens-based installations that stage narratives connected to history, identity, memory, and place. Often politically and socially engaged, her work also draws on the universal emotions associated with vulnerability, loss and beauty. Searle lives and works in Cape Town, South Africa and is currently Associate Professor at the Michaelis School of Fine Art at the University of Cape Town.
Education
Searle received her BA in Fine Art in 1987 and a postgraduate diploma in Education in 1988 from the Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town. After graduating with a BA in fine art in 1987 and a postgraduate diploma in education in 1988, Searle taught art in a Cape Town high school for two years and then re-entered Michaelis, registering for the master's degree in sculpture in 1992. While this was clearly a valuable time for accumulating technical expertise and consolidating an affinity for the three-dimensional form-something that is still visible in her photographic works today-the search for both form and content continued. Her body of work presented for the master's degree in fine art in 1995 shows abstract, voluminous structures in cement, ciment fondu, steel, wire, bronze, and glass that seem somehow incongruous with the much more intimate and lyrical works by which Searle is recognized today. Created a year after the first democratic elections, these works were meant to question euphoric ideals of nationhood and nation building in a lexicon strongly mediated, even regulated, by context and instruction.
Work
Berni Searle utilizes large scale digital photographic prints, found materials, and time-based media such as film to capture her work. Searle's work encompasses performative narratives and the self as a figure to embody history, land-memory and place. Searle is known for utilizing her own body in her pieces to highlight her own bodily agency and to construct and deconstruct identities around race and gender. Spices are a common motif in her work. Her series Colour Me is a body of work from 1998 to 2000 in which she outlines or adorns her body with different colored spices and creates life size or larger than life digital prints. The colored spices allude to the racial classifications imposed under apartheid, and also the movement of both spices and slaves during colonial regimes. Many works in the Colour Me series also feature measuring tools, signifying the colonial, pseudoscientific gaze on black bodies. Her work deals with South African History, the awareness of one's own skin color, and the consumption of a woman's body as a commodity; the confrontational power of that same body in which so many myths, desires, and necessities reside.
2013: Terminal. As part of the program LAND, various locations across the City of Cape Town. Organized by GIPCA, curated by Jean Brundrit and Svea Josephy and Adrienne van Eeden Wharton
