November 16, 2006
By Michael Tsingo
ONE of Cape Town's finest artists, Berni Searle, is holding a mid-career retrospective at the Johannesburg Art Gallery (JAG), titled Approach.
It opens on 19 November and runs until 28 February 2007. On the third day of the exhibition, Tuesday, 21 November, Searle will conduct an Artist Walkabout at 11am, followed by a lecture at 1pm.
The exhibition is a continuation of a series of solo exhibitions at the gallery focusing on South African artists who are gaining international recognition. According to curator Amy Watson, Searle's Approach exhibition is part of the gallery's programme to exhibit mid-career artists.
Searle's most recent works will be on show, like About to Forget (2005) and Night Fall (2006); past works like Snow White (2001), which is part of the JAG's contemporary collection, will also be exhibited.
JAG chief curator and the exhibition curator, Clive Kellner, describes Searle as one of those artists who has managed "to surpass the confines of identity politics to create, echoing a global cultural discourse yet closely related to home situations".
An image by Berni Searle that will be exhibited at the Johannesburg Art Gallery
"Her artistic production, although always personal and encompassing the human form, most often the artist's own body, has evolved from overt concern with body politics and identity framing to gestural, poetic subject matter, as in the video installations Home and Away, About to Forget and Night Fall," he says.
Cape Town's Michael Stevenson Gallery describes Searle's About to Forget on its website: "As suggested by the title, the works explore the process of remembering and forgetting, and the space in-between where our sense of people and events fades and blurs … the forms gradually lose their definition as the red pigment bleeds into the water, evoking the fluctuations of memory and the fluidity of relationships over time."
The artist uses video, photographs and print and most of her work is a synthesis of several techniques.
Watson says it was important for the JAG to bring Searle to Johannesburg because she had exhibited more in her hometown. "The last time she came up to Johannesburg was in 2003, when she received the Standard Bank Young Artist Award for Visual Art."
But the JAG is not the only gallery with Searle exhibitions. She also has a solo show at the USF Contemporary Art Museum in Tampa, Florida, in the United States until 16 December. She is taking part in several group exhibitions, namely Venice-Istanbul at Istanbul Modern until 26 November in Turkey; Photography, Video, Mixed Media III at DaimlerChrysler, Potsdamer Platz, in Berlin, in Germany until January 2007; and Global Feminisms at the Elizabeth A Sackler Centre, Brooklyn Museum, in New York from 23 March to 1 July 2007.
For more than a decade Searle has exhibited extensively in South Africa and internationally, winning several awards, including the Minister of Culture Prize at the 2000 Dakar Biennale and the Unesco-AICA Award at the 1998 Cairo Biennale. The 42-year-old Searle was born in Cape Town; she graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in fine arts in 1987 and received her Masters Degree in 1995 at the Michaelis School of Fine Art at the University of Cape Town.
The Johannesburg Art Gallery is on the southern border of Joubert Park; the entrance is on King George's Street. It is open from 10am to 5pm Tuesday to Sunday, and entrance is free. For more information, phone Amy Watson on 011 725 3130.
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