Berni Searle

Berni Searle (born 7 July 1964[1] in Cape Town, South Africa) 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.[2]

Berni Searle
Born (1964-07-07) 7 July 1964
Cape Town, Western Cape, South Africa
NationalitySouth African
EducationMichaelis School of Fine Art
Known forPhotography
Multimedia
Video
Websitebernisearle.com

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.[3]

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.[3]

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.[4][5] 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.[6] The colored spices allude to the racial classifications imposed under apartheid, and also the movement of both spices and slaves during colonial regimes.[7][8] Many works in the Colour Me series also feature measuring tools, signifying the colonial, pseudoscientific gaze on black bodies.[9] 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.[10]

Awards
  • UNESCO/AICA Award at the Cairo Biennale (1998)[1]
  • Minister of Culture prize at the Dak’art Biennale (2000)
  • Civitella Ranieri Fellowship (2001)
  • Standard Bank Young Artist Award (2003)
  • Rockefeller Bellagio Creative Arts Fellow (2014)

Nominations and shortlists
  • FNB VITA Art Award (2000)[1]
  • Daimler-Chrysler Award for South African Contemporary Art (2000)
  • Artes Mundi award (2004)

Selected exhibitions

Solo exhibitions
  • 2011: Interlaced, De Hallen, the Belfry Tower, Bruges; Museum voor Moderne Kunst Arnhem (MMKA), Arnhem, Netherlands; Frac Lorraine, Metz, France (with new commissioned work)
  • 2011: Shimmer, Stevenson Gallery, Cape Town
  • 2012: Black Smoke Rising Trilogy, Ron Mandos gallery, Amsterdam, Netherlands
  • 2013: Refuge, La Galerie Particuliere, Paris

Group exhibitions

References
  1. Williamson, Sue. "Artbio - Berni Searle". artthrob - Issue No. 33, May 2000. artthrob. Retrieved 14 August 2010.
  2. Leander (10 August 2016). "Berni Searle". www.sahistory.org.za. Retrieved 21 July 2017.
  3. Van Der Watt, Liese. "Tracing Berni Searle." African Arts 37:4 (Winter 2004): 74–79.
  4. Van Der Blatt, Liese (Winter 2004). "Tracing Berni Searle". African Arts. 37 (4): 74–79. doi:10.1162/afar.2004.37.4.74.
  5. Gqola, Pumla Dineo (2005). "Memory, diaspora and spiced bodies in motion: Berni Searle's art". African Identities. 3 (2): 123–138. doi:10.1080/14725840500235365. S2CID 144176178.
  6. Westerveld, Judith (July 2013). "Transforming One Sensible World to Another: Dissensus in Contemporary South African Art". RMA Thesis Arts and Culture: Artistic Research.
  7. Visonà, Monica Blackmun (2008). A history of art in Africa. Pearson/Prentice Hall. ISBN 978-0136128724. OCLC 123137112.
  8. Gqola, Pumla Dineo (2005). "Memory, diaspora, and spiced bodies in motion: Berni Searle's art". African Identities. 3 (2): 123–138. doi:10.1080/14725840500235365. S2CID 144176178.
  9. Lewis, Desiree (2001). "The Conceptual Art of Berni Searle". Agenda: Empowering Women for Gender Equity. 50: 108–117.
  10. Leander (10 August 2016). "Berni Searle". South African History Online. Retrieved 17 December 2017.
  11. Gevisser, Mark (23 April 2011). "Figures & Fictions at the V&A". The Guardian. London. Retrieved 28 February 2017.
  12. "Yithi Laba exhibition opening". The Market Photo Workshop. 22 February 2019. Retrieved 9 November 2019.

Bibliography

Perryer, Sophie (2004). 10 Years 100 Artists: Art in a Democratic South Africa. Cape Town: Struik. ISBN 1868729877. Archived from the original on 2 April 2015. Retrieved 7 March 2015.

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