Berni searle biography of alberta

Searle held four solo exhibitions at the Stevenson Gallery between and 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.

Born in Cuba, but arriving in the United States as a refugee in , Mendieta was displaced from her home and land whereas the nation that Searle has grown up with South Africa , has made her feel displaced within it and without actually leaving it. 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. After graduating, Searle taught art in a Cape Town high school for two years and then re-entered Michaelis, registering for a master's degree in sculpture in While this was 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 -, her search for both form and content continued.

Her body of work presented for the master's degree in fine art in 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.

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.

Searle's series Colour Me is a body of work created between and for which she had herself photographed, her body outlined or adorned with different colored spices, to create life size or larger than life digital color prints. With her installation A Darker Shade of Light , Searle responds to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission , which was intended to bring justice to the victims of violent crimes that occurred in South Africa during the apartheid era.

This work is made up of close-up photos of parts of Searle's naked body - including images of the nape of the neck, the back, the palms, and the soles of the feet -, all of which are covered in henna powder to mimic the appearance of bruising. By altering the appearance of her body and positioning herself in ways that reference the victimization of women, Searle creates the types of images that many saw to be lacking in the testimonies at the TRC hearings.

Thus, the work examines the issue of visibility with regard to trauma and the abuse of women. Searle's installation A Place in the Sun consists of four screens that play video of a drained swimming pool in the socially diverse Maitland community in Cape Town throughout the day. The video offers glimpses into the nostalgic feelings of residents of the community through the music and sounds of children playing over the desolate space as the artist and other figures occasionally pass in and out of the frame.

Berni searle biography of alberta

As the scene shifts to nighttime, fire breaks out in the previously solemn setting while the ambient sounds of the community continue, eventually being overtaken by police sirens. Through this piece, Searle calls to attention the issues of insufficient funding and housing in communities like Maitland, as well as the political protests that had taken place in South Africa in recent years.

Perryer, Sophie Cape Town: Struik. ISBN Searle conceives her works as reminders of the visible and invisible traumas that pervade post-Apartheid South Africa. In Colour Me , the artist is depicted lying down, her naked body covered in colourful spices turmeric, ground cloves, paprika , eyes turned toward the public. In this case, B. Searle uses an individual destiny as an allusion to merchant shipping in Cape Town during the colonial period.

In some of her works, violence seems to delve more deeply into the skin, such as in the series Discoloured , in which parts of her body are covered in henna and compressed until the flesh appears to be wounded. Searle has always sought to distance her works from stereotyped depictions of black women. Instead, the identities she embodies are more fluid and constantly changing, as is the case in the video Snow White , in which she kneads together a loaf of bread from the water and flour that is showered onto her kneeling body.

They reflect a desire to present myself in various ways to counter the image that has been imposed on me. Race is inevitable in South Africa. The presence and absence of the body in the work points to the idea that one's identity is not static, and constantly in a state of flux. Although in her recent work, she has moved on from using the spices in the Colour Me series which first grabbed international attention, the curators asked her to develop a new piece on that theme.

Her piece will consist of six open 'cubicles', the three sides of which will be formed by three-metre high prints. The floor of the cubicle will be covered with spices, so viewers can look into the cubicles but not enter. The piece will be entitled Red, Yellow, Brown: face to face. Away from the support system of digital processing Searle had set up in Cape Town, and faced with high London prices on a tiny budget, it was not altogether an easy period for the artist to make work.

And before that: The transition in Searle's focus from the work made as a masters student Searle received her M. All the artists for the show were black, and the workshop, says Searle, led to her confronting the issue of blackness for the first time, and realizing that up to now her work had not really engaged with her own sense of self.