After Berni Searle’s early performance pieces in the 1990s became iconic art works of the first postapartheid years, the artist looked beyond her own heritage and identity to address wider areas of concern. In her video Home and Away (2003) Searle focuses on the dislocation and longing of desperate working-class African men and women trying to reach Europe in search of a new life. The sea between North Africa and Spain is heavily policed by Spanish authorities hoping to discourage the small boats carrying these refugees, and it is in this very stretch of water that we find Searle floating on her back, eyes closed.
Her body moves with the waves of the ocean, and a whisper comes to our ears—it says “I love . . . I fear . . . I leave.” A pool of black squid ink engulfs her diaphanous red and white robe and slowly surrounds her floating figure, echoing her use of spices to stain and obscure her body in her earlier work.
Equally striking imagery appears in Once Removed (2008), a series of six photographs. Searle is pictured with her head shrouded and her lap covered with cloths, or veils, of wet paper pulp. A white veil is worn by a bride; a woman who “has taken the cloth” and become a nun wears a concealing white headdress, and a white sheet is drawn over the face of one who has just died. Searle’s ambiguous title, Once Removed, could be read to suggest all of these rites of passage.
There is an elegiac wreath of black crepe paper flowers on her head, a garland in her lap. Slowly the black pigment leaks into the white pulp, and the flowers disintegrate to soggy shreds, pooling black liquid like spilled blood on the floor.
The artist often uses the strongly charged color of black in her work. Black streamers wave against the sky or bleed color into the water surrounding a red paper boat in a tank of water in Searle’s video Alibama (2008), which recalls the origins of one of the Cape’s best known songs, “Daar Kom die Alibama”—“There comes the Alabama” thought to refer to the 1863 sighting of the American Confederate ship the Alabama in Table Bay.
Filmed from the shore above Table Bay, the day turns from sunny to dark as on the soundtrack we hear Searle teaching her young son the words of the popular song, which also lists the months of the year—January, February, March, and so on . . . names often given to slaves by masters who denied them their real names.
Oppression, dislocation, the inhumanities not only of the past but of the present . . . these stains cloud the waters of our existence and, Searle’s lyrical work seems to imply, cannot easily be washed away.
Waiting 2003
Lithograph on BFK Rives watercolor paper
55.5 x 66 cm
Image courtesy the artist and the Michael Stevenson Gallery, Cape Town
© Berni Searle
Spirit of ’76 2007
Video stills
HD One-channel video projection
© Berni Searle
Alibama 2008
Video stills
HD One-channel video projection
Image courtesy of the artist and the Michael Stevenson Gallery, Cape Town
© Berni Searle
Alibama 2008
Video stills
HD One-channel video projection
Image courtesy of the artist and the Michael Stevenson Gallery, Cape Town
© Berni Searle
Once Removed (Lap I, II, III) 2008
Archival pigment ink on cotton rag paper
Triptych, 112 x 95 cm each
Image courtesy of the artist and the Michael
Stevenson Gallery, Cape Town
Photographer: Tony Meintjes
© Berni Searle