Tracing: Berni Searle.

The story of South Africa's liberation is most often told in the grand narrative of the struggle and liberation of an oppressed people. But what follows that moment of freedom? How do we measure democracy or gauge our transformation over the last ten years? Quantifying new houses that were built, electricity supplied, and water pipes laid, or assessing black equity and political representation are reliable ways to survey our democracy and its failures. But what is inevitably obscured by these public narratives are the more intimate accounts of personal discoveries that are, partly, the result of a changed political landscape.

Berni Searle's emergence as an artist of international repute coincides more or less with South Africa's first decade of democracy. Much has been written on Searle's work over the last few years, (1) especially in the wake of a series of major prizes she has won since 1998. Often texts about her work have fixated on her subversion of racial categories, a legitimate focus given South Africa's apartheid past, but one that also obscures the more organic and complex development of her oeuvre. In considering the chronology of her works from student days onwards, one realizes that her work is never overdetermined by race or identity politics, but rather proclaims a far more subtle process of ongoing interrogation, exploration, and discovery through the confluence of a number of different factors.

In a 2003 documentary directed by Cape Town artist Vuyile Voyiya and American art historian Julie McGee about the experiences of black artists in contemporary South Africa titled The Luggage Is Still Labeled, (2) Searle speaks about feeling isolated and alienated when she first entered the University of Cape Town's Michaelis School of Fine Art in the mid-1980s. While the film posits this as a fact of her blackness, one realizes that her alienation had as much to do with her gender position in a predominantly male environment, especially at the level of instruction, as with her racial position in a primarily white institution. Thinking back to those days, Searle speaks frankly about her frustrating search for role models and texts to help her theorize ideas that were perhaps not yet clearly articulated, but present in embryonic form. (3) While a certain level of political consciousness was probably inevitable for anyone growing up in the 1960s and 1970s in a "colored" community in South Africa, translating those concerns into the cultural realm proved to be a complex process. Scouring the library shelves for relevant literature, Searle found resonance with the identity politics of black British theorists such as Kobena Mercer and Paul Gilroy, who at the time were starting to question the inclusivity of Britishness. African American women artists such as Pat Ward Williams and Lorna Simpson expressed in visual terms critical ideas that Searle could selectively draw on.

After graduating with a BA in fine art in 1987 and a postgraduate diploma in education in 1988, Searle taught art in a Cape Town high school for two years and then re-entered Michaelis, registering for the masters' degree in sculpture in 1992. While this was clearly 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--the search for both form and content continued. Her body of work presented for the masters' degree in fine art in 1995 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.

Take, for instance, For Fatherland, a monumental work in three components, measuring, as a whole, 181cm x 172cm (6' x 5 1/2'; Fig. 4). Three vertical structures are placed in a half-circle, their form vaguely reminiscent of Gothic architecture, thereby imbuing the work with an enshrined, sacred quality. Embedded in the glass are traces of stick figures, left there through the process of sand-casting. The work is meant to be a monument to notions of self-sacrifice in the name of the nation and nationhood. Like the empty wire flags in the lower part of each structure, these ghostly stick figures are a cynical comment on the misplaced ideals of patriotism and nationalism.

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At the risk of essentializing, one could argue that this kind of sculpture resembles exactly the abstract, minimalist, solid, and masculine works that many feminist artists rebelled against when they deliberately reinserted the female body into their work in the late 1970s and early 1980s in a symbolic gesture to politicize the personal. By contrast, these early student works of Berni Searle now seem strangely anonymous and conceptually unstructured, somewhat stunted by an environment where there were no female mentors and too little exposure to the kind of feminist theory that would later play a formative role in honing her artistic vision. Yet these works make sense within her larger oeuvre because they explore at a collective level ideas about identity and race that Searle would later address on a personal level, albeit with infinite more subtlety and nuance.

In 1997, during the Second Johannesburg Biennial, Searle was chosen for American curator Kelly Jones's all-female show titled "Life's Little Necessities." Although this show was limited to only one location--the historic Castle built by the Dutch in Cape Town in the seventeenth century--it did bring a measure of international recognition for Searle and, more importantly, exposed her for the first time to many of the female artists whom she had found inspirational over the years. On show with her were Jocelyn Taylor, Pat Ward Williams, Fiona Tan, and Lorna Simpson, among others. It was here, in this context of colonial trade and commerce, that Searle first used spices in her work, in an installation in the basement of the Castle titled Com-fort, meant to invoke the kitchen and the feminine sphere (Figs. 2 and 3).

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In many ways this work is an important precursor for later themes: Not only is it Searle's first installation, but the work also anticipates a gradual shift from the collective to the personal. Where earlier student works had addressed large issues of nation, ethnicity, and collective identity, Searle now began to look with heightened awareness at the intersection of site, location, and personal identity. The use of spices in her work is a case in point: Whereas in the installation in the Castle Searle employs spices as site-specific substances that reference the history of the colonial period, their significance is thereafter gradually entwined with her own experience, inaugurating an almost constant theme in her work of cooking, nourishment, and the rituals that accompany them.

So, for instance, in 1998, Searle started the Colour Me series, digital photographs always featuring her naked body covered or surrounded by spices. Shooting the work over two days with photographer and colleague Jean Brundrit from the University of Stellenbosch, where she was lecturing at the time, Searle was drawn to the immediacy of photography and to the visual and conceptual possibilities of her naked body, a combination that led to various configurations of the Colour Me series. One of the first incarnations was Red, Yellow, Brown (Fig. 1), for which Searle received the UNESCO Award from the Art Critics' Association at the Cairo Biennial in 1998, and in 2000 she exhibited a large installation of eighteen prints from the Colour Me series at the Dak'Art Biennial in Dakar, for which she received the Minister of Culture prize.

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As the name of the series suggests, Colour Me and its various components at first reading challenge racial classifications by wilfully experimenting with color and appearance. But it is through the strategic use of the body that Searle manages to convey what, in my opinion, stands central to her work: the instability and indeed the insufficiency of all identity. By positioning herself in her work simultaneously as both subject and object, author and text, Searle develops what has been a leitmotif since student days but is here articulated with much more force and yet with much more sensitivity: She literalizes the radical insufficiency of identity by devising a practice that visualizes simultaneous presence and absence, visibility and invisibility, as if she is never quite anywhere. This practice, what I have elsewhere dubbed "an aesthetics of disappearance," (4) refuses to position the self in any conclusive way; it is a strategy of in/visibility that enacts her/our struggle for identity by avoiding fixity.

In Traces, for instance, the play with presence and absence is enacted in a series of six tall, photo-based digital prints, hung in two parallel rows, one row showing us the artist's naked body shot obliquely from above and covered in powdered spices, the other row the imprint of her absent body in the powder. Where the body is absent a postal scale at the foot of each photograph is filled with spices, as if Searle's body is somehow captured in these neat heaps of fragrant red, yellow, and brown powders. And perhaps it is: The spices are a reference to Searle's ancestry, with which she feels a tentative connection primarily through the foods her family eats. One of her maternal great-grandfathers came from Mauritius (as a cook), the other from Saudi Arabia, bringing with them distinct culinary traditions. As in many families, food becomes a site of communion and continuation.

In the Discoloured series (1999-2000)--a body of work first intended for "Truth Veils," an exhibition at the Gertrude Posel Gallery in Johannesburg that was mounted in response to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission--Searle further explores the rich potential of the naked body. In a sociopolitical context of inquiry, accusation, and punishment, Searle chooses to magnify intimate and hidden parts of the body: the palms of the hands, the small of the back, the nape of the neck, under the belly, and the soles of the feet. The lyrical intimacy promised by these body parts is powerfully curbed by the addition of black Egyptian henna, producing a stain on the skin that resembles bruises, a strategy that inserts the personal and the private prominently into a public context of trauma and injury.

In 2001 Searle produced Snow White, a video work commissioned by Olu Oguibe and Salah Hassan for their show "Authentic / Ex-centric" at the Forty-ninth Venice Biennale (Fig. 5). For the first time Searle had a budget to employ a production company, a move that enabled her to take video as a medium seriously but one that also brought new artistic challenges when working with a team of people. Snow White clearly developed out of the conceptual terrain of the earlier Colour Me series in its intent to "unfix" the self through strategies of appearance and disappearance. Projected onto two screens and filmed from different angles, Searle is shown kneeling in a pool of light, almost indistinguishable from the black floor and background. White flour falls from above--quietly, like the first snow--and gradually brings her body into focus, defining it and then enlarging and elaborating on that form. Eventually Searle claims her bodily form back by wiping the flour off her and onto the floor and then starts noisily, ritualistically, to make a dough from the flour, now wet with water that we hear dripping from above. On a somewhat literal level we may read this work as a challenge to normative whiteness by celebrating black identity, but it is also about the movement from object to subject, from being passive to being active, and about claiming agency and self-definition.

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Snow White was followed by Matter of Time, a DVD projection produced for the Berkeley Art Museum. The work was shot with a stationary camera installed under a glass box suspended 8m (26 1/2') in the air.

While Searle, filmed from the soles of her feet up, stands waiting against a black, void-like background, olive oil slides stealthily and sensuously over the glass floor and surrounds her feet. She starts walking, trying to negotiate her way across this treacherous surface. The resulting footage of this balancing act is turned sideways so that what we see is Searle not walking out and across but, even more precariously, up and sliding down. The video is completely quiet, except when Searle slides down (really back), accompanied by a high-pitched squeaking sound produced by her body sliding over wet glass. She disappears from view and then it starts all over again. It is a strange work, formally full of weird angles and dramatic lighting, with Searle's soles moving closer to the camera with each attempt to walk, her face hovering almost disjointedly above. The work is quite different in tone from other works, less lyrical, much more agitated and tense.

For Searle, the use of olive oil is a personal reference to her grandmother describing her as having "olive" skin, but more importantly, the fluid quality of the oil literalizes the idea of mutable identity. Capitalizing on this, we may relate the olive oil to the theme of cooking in Searle's work: Foodstuffs--the spices in Colour Me, dough for roti in Snow White, and here olive oil--powerfully communicate the hybridity and instability of her own identity by invoking her varied ancestry. Indeed, in the sustained reference to personal history and to her complex lineage, Searle's work seeks not origins, but networks; not purity, but crossings; not endings, but processes.

The self as node within a complex network of relations is further explored in Home and Away, a video produced at Montenmedio Arte Contemporaneo Foundation, situated in Vejer, at the southern tip of Spain. Located on the Strait of Gibraltar, it is a place that brims with historical and geopolitical references to the movement of humans and trade not simply from Africa to Europe but also from east to west. Were it not for this important strait, one would need to travel around Africa to enter or exit the Mediterranean, and eased by this point of access and contact, now-Catholic southern Spain was a Moorish and Islamic stronghold until the 1400s. It is a locale that immediately appealed to Searle for its allusions to contact and exchange, to insertion and dispersal, to displacement and diaspora--in short, a contact zone crammed with both poetry and pain.

There, floating in the middle of the ocean between Spain and Morocco, Searle performed the visual component for Home and Away (Fig. 6) and the related photographic series Waiting #1-6. Wearing a long, red satin skirt with a translucent white overlay, the hem piped with polystyrene to make it float on a turquoise sea, Searle lies on her back, buoyantly following the ebb and flow of the current. We see a fragile, drifting body seemingly lost in place and time. The body becomes a glistening sculpture of sorts, its corporeality enlarged and altered by the billowing mass of fabric, wet and animated and glowing with a life of its own.

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Gradually, black ink enters the frame and soon invades the cloth and body, clouding our vision of that exquisite image. As always in Searle's work, lyricism is tempered, held in check. One possible reference is to squid's ink, which is released when under threat, and obliquely to Spain, where squid's ink is a gastronomic delicacy. As we lose the form and color of the luminous body to the contamination of black ink, we are made to realize the fragility of that coherent form; we witness the foreign within the known. Do we see a body or a squid or something else altogether? What happens to the form? Suddenly, cleverly, we are alienated from that body; that which seemed secure and familiar only a moment ago becomes ambivalent and threatening, and we realize that we are not as securely located in our identities as we would like to be. The body/Self seems to lie in waiting, always in limbo, between being and becoming.

Searle's latest work, Vapour, produced in 2004, takes as its point of departure a striking photograph from the front page of a Cape Town newspaper that showed 107 pots of food cooking over open fires as part of a feeding project during the Muslim festival of Eid. Initially Searle was simply struck by the sheer visual spectacle of this massive operation, but the attendant issues of community and collectivity, of tradition and inheritance that are raised by this annual ritual also provided fertile ground to explore the kind of questions of personal and collective identity that stand central to her work.

For Vapour, Searle decided to restage the event, filling massive pots not with food but with water (Fig. 7). In low camera angles we see close-ups of the fires and the pots, the human presence almost secondary to this, suggested only by bare feet or, in the video, dark silhouettes moving through the rows of roaring fires. Mostly it is a composition of light and dark, a striking chiaroscuro landscape that emphasizes the vulnerability of humans in the blaze. The fire, the water that cooks and vaporizes, lifting the huge lids, instantiate change and transformation, and toward the end of the video we are left with an aerial view of a smoldering field, an apocalyptic landscape. This is a work that once again speaks about change and transformation: Albeit not through the personal body, Searle once again foregrounds identity in transition, here subjected to catharsis.

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Vapour seems like something of a departure from works that focused so closely on the body, and while this might be simply a temporary change of direction, it is tempting to plot this artist's oeuvre along a line that moves from the collective to the intensely personal, and now to different, perhaps less intimate, concerns. It is especially tempting to see this development in terms of a decade of democracy that has allowed or even liberated individuals to move from the urgent articulation of group identity to the luxury of more personal explorations. However, this would be to misrepresent the artist because behind all these historical grand narratives is also the struggle to find an artistic language that is comfortable, appropriate, and just right.

[This article was accepted for publication in June 2004.]

(1.) See for instance Bester 2003; Coombes 2001, 2003; Murinik 2001; and Van Der Watt 2003, 2004a, 2004b.

(2.) The film presented interviews with fifteen primarily Cape Town-based artists, mostly black. See Pissarra 2003 and Woubshet 2003 for a discussion of the film.

(3.) Interview with the author on July 23, 2004, Cape Town.

(4.) I have used this phrase in a previous essay on Searle (Van Der Watt 2003) and am borrowing from Jane Blocker's description of Cuban artist Ana Mendieta's work (1999:24). This discussion of Searle's work and much of what follows have been extracted from my previous writings on Searle (Van Der Watt 2003, 2004a, 2004b).

References cited

Bester, Rory. 2003. "Floating Free." In Berni Searle: Float. Standard Bank Young Artist Award catalogue. Cape Town: Bell Roberts Publishing.

Blocker, Jane. 1999. Where is Ana Mendieta? Identity, Performativity, and Exile. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Coombes, Annie E. 2001. "Skin Deep/Bodies of Evidence: The Work of Berni Searle." In Authentic/Ex-Centric: Conceptualism in Contemporary African Art. Edited by Salah Hassan and Olu Oguibe, pp. 178-201. Ithaca, NY: Forum for African Arts.

--.2003. "Memories Are Made of This." In Fresh. Cape Town: South African National Gallery.

Murinik, Tracy. 2001. "Berni Searle." NKA Journal of Contemporary Art. 13/14:74-9.

Pissarra, Mario. 2003. "Decolonize the Mind." Art South Africa 2,2:37-41.

Van Der Watt, Liese. 2003. "Disappearing Act." Art South Africa 1(4):22-8.

--. 2004a. "Identity's Lack, Identity's Excess: Two Works by Berni Searle and Minnette Vari." Exhibition catalogue of A Decade of Democraey. Edited by Emma Bedford, pp. 120-27. Cape Town: South African National Gallery.

--. 2004b. "Shifting the Self, Contesting the Body: The Art of Berni Searle." In the exhibition catalogue for Artes Mundi Wales International Visual Art Prize. Edited by Tessa Jackson, pp. 68-74. Brigend, Wales: Artes Mundi and Seren Press.

Woubshet, Dagmawi. 2003. "Staging the Rainbow Nation." Art South Africa 2,2:33-6.