colour me

“Berni Searle’s ‘Colour Me’ series (1998−2000) focuses on the colonial history of the artist’s native Cape Town, South Africa, established in the seventeenth century as a refreshment station along the Dutch East India Company’s spice trade route to Indonesia. As a result, large populations of Indian indentured servants were sent to the Cape to work for Dutch settlers. They have formed an integral part of the city’s population and culture ever since. In ‘Girl’, Searle employs the language of ethnography and anthropology to address racism in South African politics, history, and visual culture. The artist portrays herself in a corpse-like manner, dissected into twelve photographs, thereby transforming her body into a fetishized object for display. The photographs are topped by glass jars with various local spices, such as paprika, turmeric, and brown cloves. ‘Girl’ speaks to the reality of hybridity created by indentured servitude and the cultural and racial mixing of natives, colonizers, and colonized (African, Dutch, and Indian). The ‘Colour Me’ series also functions as a direct reference to apartheid and the government’s creation of a third racial category for mixed ethnicities, called “coloured,” in which Searle was/is included. The reinscription of her own body back into this charged history functions conceptually to compound and disband the history of colonial power and relationships.” — Amy Brandt, “Global Feminisms”

Berni Searle was born in Cape Town in 1964 where she now lives and works. She graduated with a BAFA from the University of Cape Town in 1987 and completed her MAFA in 1995, also at UCT. Her survey show, Interlaced, showed at De Hallen in Bruges, Belgium; Frac Lorraine in Metz, France; and the Museum voor Moderne Kunst Arnhem, the Netherlands, in 2011. Recent group exhibitions include Pictures by Women: A history of modern photography at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2011); Variations at the Mendel Art Gallery, Saskatchewan, Canada (2011); Space, Ritual, Absence: Liminality in South African visual art at the FADA Gallery, University of Johannesburg (2011); and Figures and Fictions: Contemporary South African Photography at the V&A Museum in London (2011).

Berni Searle has work on Distance and Desire: Encounters with the African Archive at the Walther Collection in Ulm, Germany (8 June through to 2015); and on Earth Matters: Land as Material and Metaphor in the Arts of Africa at the Smithsonian National Museum for African Art (22 April – 5 January).

Berni Searle is represented by Stevenson Cape Town and Johannesburg.

Also see www.bernisearle.com