‘Having but little Gold’ is a retrospective exhibition that will showcase many – old and new – works from South African artist, Berni Seale at the Norval Foundation.
Born in 1964, Berni Searle is an artist who works across diverse media which includes photography, video, and film, to produce lens-based installations that stage narratives connected to history, identity, memory, and place. She often explores socially and politically engaging themes in her work. She draws on universal emotions relating to vulnerability, loss, resilience, and beauty.
Image courtesy of Aware
Berni Searle’s creative process begins with herself as the subject. As a mixed-race African woman, Searle sees herself as a person with multiple identities, which is evident in her work as her self-portraits explore the multiple selves of a wounded collective body. Her works are reminders of the visible and invisible traumas of post-Apartheid South Africa.
Her notable works include:
- ‘In Colour Me’ (1998-2000), an exhibition that showed her lying naked and covered in colourful spices like turmeric, ground cloves, and paprika, with her eyes turned toward the public. In this work, she portrayed an individual destiny to allude to merchant shipping in Cape Town during the colonial period.
- In the series, ‘Discoloured (1999-2000)’, Searle had parts of her body covered in henna and wound tightly till the covered parts appeared to be wounded.
- In ‘Profile (2002)’, her cheeks became a canvas for temporary markings which were etched into the skin to represent the various stories of oppression suggested by historically significant symbols like a Catholic cross, a Dutch windmill, and the British crown.
Image courtesy of Brooklyn Museum
Searle has made works that even as a key subject, with which she creates complex images and narratives, are open to multiple interpretations. Over the last twenty-five years, her poetically charged work consistently challenges her viewers to interrogate accepted notions of identity, history, culture, memory, space and place.
The exhibition will run from 15 February 2023 until 13 November 2023 at Atrium and Galleries. The works that will be shown will include her early photographs and videos.
Currently an Associate Professor at the Michaelis School of Fine Art at the University of Cape Town, Searle has been able to influence her peers as well as a younger generation of artists that have followed her.
The exhibition is accompanied by a major publication, a series of public discussions and extensive digital content that will highlight her contributions. Dr Liese van der Watt, the Guest Curator of the exhibition, will work alongside Searle and Norval Foundation’s curatorial team over the past four years.
Image courtesy of Norval Foundation
