Artist Biography
Berni Searle was born in 1964 in Cape Town, South Africa, where she currently lives and works. She studied at the Michaelis School of Fine Art at the University of Cape Town, completing her MA in 1995. In 2003 she was presented with the prestigious Standard Bank Young Artist Award (South Africa), with a resulting solo exhibition, Float, which toured nationally. In 2004 Searle was short-listed for the international Artes Mundi award. Other solo exhibitions have included A Matter of Time at the UC, Berkeley Art Museum, 2003; Presence, Speed Museum, Louisville, Kentucky, USA, 2004; and About to Forget, Michael Stevenson Contemporary Art Gallery, Cape Town, 2005. Recent group exhibitions include Hang In There, My Dear Geum-Sun, Busan Biennale, Busan Metropolitan Art Museum, Seoul, 2004; Min(e)dfields, Kunsthaus Baselland, Basel, 2004; 5th Shanghai Biennale, Shanghai Art Museum, China, 2004; and Always a Little Further at the 51st Venice Biennale, 2005. Berni Searle is represented by Michael Stevenson Gallery, Cape Town.
Michael Stevenson Gallery
Works
About to forget 2005
Vapour 2004
Home and away 2003
Artist Statement
Drawing from personal narratives as well as more collective experiences, my work can be seen as a series of explorations around the body, history, time and place. Playing with the visibility/invisibility of the body, these performative works tend to manifest themselves in both imaginary and imaginable ways. Revealing and not revealing, they create, in the process, scenarios in which nothing is ever entirely apparent.
