Berni Searle

Berni Searle (born 7 July 1964 in Cape Town, South Africa) is an artist who works with photography, video, and film to produce lens-based installations that stage narratives connected to history, identity, memory, and place. Often politically and socially engaged, her work also draws on universal emotions associated with vulnerability, loss and beauty. Searle lives and works in Cape Town, South Africa, and is currently an associate professor at the Michaelis School of Fine Art at the University of Cape Town.

Quotes

• Without providing any definite answers, I think my work raises questions about attitudes towards race and gender. I think it operates on different levels and reflects different racial and political experiences - but I don't think my pieces are limited by that. I hope they transcend and go beyond that, and provide a space for illusion and fantasy. They reflect a desire to present myself in various ways to counter the image that has been imposed on me. Race is inevitable in South Africa.
  • Williamson, Sue. "Artbio - Berni Searle". artthrob - Issue No. 33, May 2000. artthrob. Retrieved 25 March 2025.

• The self is explored as an ongoing process of construction in time and place. The presence and absence of the body in the work points to the idea that one's identity is not static, and constantly in a state of flux.
  • Williamson, Sue. "Artbio - Berni Searle". artthrob - Issue No. 33, May 2000. artthrob. Retrieved 25 March 2025.

• I don’t have a ‘feminist artist statement’ as such. Being a woman is only one aspect of who I am.
  • Leander (10 August 2016). "Berni Searle". South African History Online. Retrieved 25 March 2025.

Quotes about Berni Searle

• Searle pays constant attention to the social issues and movements in South Africa, such as xenophobia, access to housing, land and political protests. Her work is not reducible to simple poignant condemning. Rather, through her visual language, ripe with symbolism and narrativity, she creates the entanglement of poetic and violent imagery which captures the contradictions and complexities of South Africa.
  • Zhang, Lifang; Muvhuti, Barnabas Ticha. "Site of Memory: Berni Searle's "A Place in the Sun"". ArtThrob. Retrieved 25 March 2025.

• We were denied the experience of knowing what Nelson Mandela looked like. We were denied the experience of each other's lives." Still, "one developed ways around the system that were illicit but expressive . . . we all learned, as it were, to wiggle and squiggle.
  • Gevisser, Mark (23 April 2011). "Figures & Fictions at the V&A". The Guardian. London. Retrieved 25 March 2025.