In 1997 curator Okwui Enwezor’s theme for the 2nd Johannesburg Biennale was Trade Routes: History and Geography. It was an authoritative exposition focusing on how the commercial enterprises of the most powerful colonial nations indelibly marked the social histories and structures of their subject colonies.
In one of the Biennale exhibitions, Life’s Little Necessities, staged in the Cape Town Castle, curator Kellie Jones chose artist Berni Searle’s installation Com-fort (1997). Searle created the pentagon shape of the Castle building on the floor of an old kitchen, in a thick layer of paprika. On each of the five points of the pentagon stood a cast resin block with objects associated with home, like a vase, embedded into the block. The Castle was once the stronghold of the colonizing Dutch East India Company. In the seventeenth century Company ships transported spices from the East Indies to Europe via the Cape, picking up fresh vegetables for their crews and dropping off slaves to work in the Company gardens in Cape Town en route. The descendants of these slaves form the basis of the mixed race population in the Cape today. Com-fort reflected on the personal stories behind the history of colonialism.
Working with the spices even more directly, Searle had herself photographed by photographer Jean Brundrit for a series of photographs and installations titled Colour Me (1998)—a title that suggests defiant submission and also racial classification. In four of the photographic works in the Colour Me series, deliberately titled Untitled, Searle lies on her back, recalling the position slave women were required to adopt for their Dutch masters, who often raped them, with her body covered with a dense layer of spice. The artist used in turn the brightly colored spices of red paprika, brown cloves, white pea flour, and yellow turmeric.
Moving the position of her head from full profile in the first image to three-quarter angle in the final photograph, Searle directs her gaze into the camera, and toward us. Thus her audience is implicated in the situation in which Searle finds herself: weighed down, stilled, and suffocated by the stuff that is ironically produced for the nourishment and succour of the body. The realization of her inability to breathe beneath the spices—for how can she exhale without disturbing the layers of spices—combines with the discomfort of her red-rimmed eyes, burning from the spices, and now staring at the viewer.
While not eschewing the racial lexicon of color imposed by apartheid, Searle has shifted the gaze to the hues, tones, and textures of the foodstuffs that played a role in her history rather than the pigment of her skin. Her work suggests that identity is firmly relocated to culture and traditions rather than the imposed laws that naturalize identity in the racialized body.
Untitled (Colour Me series) 1998
Hand-printed color photographs
42 x 50 cm
Image courtesy of the Michael Stevenson Gallery, Cape Town
Photographer: Jean Brundrit
© Berni Searle
Untitled (Colour Me series) 1998
Hand-printed color photographs
42 x 50 cm
Image courtesy of the Michael Stevenson Gallery, Cape Town
Photographer: Jean Brundrit
© Berni Searle