Berni Searle

Berni Searle

17 April–12 June 2011
Cultuurcentrum Brugge, BE
www.ccbrugge.be

20 May–18 September 2011
49 Nord 6 Est – FRAC Lorraine, Metz, FR
www.fraclorraine.org

9 July–16 October 2011
Museum voor Moderne Kunst Arnhem, NL
www.mmkarnhem.nl

Berni Searle works with lens-based media—photography, video, and film—to stage narratives connected to history, memory, and place. While her work is intertwined with South African history that has emerged from a “life apart” (apartheid), her poetic and abstract imagery transcends the specific to address ideas about belonging and displacement in various contexts.

She questions tirelessly the self and the other, examining the elements of her own identity shaped by successive cross-fertilizations: a “composite identity” based on “creolization,” a notion dear to Edouard Glissant’s heart.

Begun in the early 1990s, Searle’s work (installations, videos, and photographs) is poetically political. Nourished by personal mythologies, it questions memories and memory (About to forget, 2005), underscoring the dynamics of human relations, the dissolution of family ties, and the arbitrary character of racial, religious, and gender categories.

Searle often works with her own body, upon which experiences and memories are inscribed and expressed (Colour Me, 1998; Snow White, 2001; Mute, 2008). Violence and suffering are rarely shown outright. Rather, they burst forth from the sumptuous image whose lyrical and esthetic qualities are imbued with dramatic intensity (Vapour, 2004; Moonlight, 2010).

In her most recent work Interlaced, 2011, Searle’s performance unfolds like a ritual of transition. Minimal gestures and delicate materials evoke a sacral mood in which loss merges with longing and healing. Without ever slipping into pathos, Berni Searle creates a polysemic, disturbing, intimately personal, and profoundly universal work.

Berni Searle was born in 1964 in Cape Town, South Africa, where she continues to live and work. She graduated from the Cape Town University in 1995. Since 1999, her work has been featured in numerous solo and collective exhibitions in South Africa, the U.S., and Europe, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Venice Biennales of 2001 and 2005.

The exhibition is part of the retrospective Berni Searle. Interlaced co-organized by Cultuurcentrum Brugge (BE), 49 Nord 6 Est – FRAC Lorraine (FR), and the Museum voor Moderne Kunst in Arnhem (NL).

A trilingual catalogue outlines the origins of the videotryptich Interlaced and inscribes it in the broader context of Berni Searle’s work. Publisher: MMKA Arnhem. Co-publishers: 49 Nord 6 Est – FRAC Lorraine and Cultuurcentrum Brugge. Texts: Julie McGee, Michel Dewilde and Mirjam Westen.