Berni SEARLE (b. 1964)
Still, Passing By I
2005
archival pigment ink on cotton rag paper
1-3 from a series of 10 stills from 35mm cinemascope film
edition: 3/3
20.3 x 48cm each
Using her body to create affective images and narratives, Berni Searle works with lens-based media, especially photography and video. Still, Passing By I (2005), the three artworks by Searle in the SABC Art Collection, are from the period between… Continue Reading
BIOGRAPHY
Born in Cape Town, Berni Searle works with photography and the moving image. She received her MFA from the Michaelis School of Fine Art at the University of Cape Town in 1995, and is the currently a Professor at and the Director of the School.
Since the 1990s, Searle has developed a deeply politically and socially engaged body of work, using lens-based media—photography, video, and film— and performance to stage narratives connected to history, memory and place. Drawing on universal emotions associated with vulnerability, loss and beauty, she often portrays her own body as the incarnation of a wounded collective body with multiple identities. As a mixed-race African woman, Searle conceives her works as reminders of the visible and invisible traumas that pervade post-apartheid South Africa.
Having But Little Gold, a retrospective of her work, showed at Norval Foundation in 2023.
Other solo exhibitions include Interlaced at De Hallen in Bruges, Belgium and the Museum for Moderne Kunst Arnhem (MMKA) in the Netherlands and Frac Lorraine in Metz France (2011) .
Group exhibitions include Senses of Time: Video and film-based works of Africa at Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, USA (2015 – 2017); The film will always be you at Tate Modern, London, UK (2015); Chroma at Stevenson Gallery, Cape Town (2015); Earth Matters at the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC (2013); Distance and Desire. Encounters with the African Archive. Part II: Contemporary Reconfigurations at the Walther Collection Project Space, New York, USA (2012); invited guest artist at Dak’Art 2012 (Dakar Biennale), National Gallery, Dakar, Senegal (2012); Cinema Remixed and Reloaded 2.0. Black women and the moving image since 1970 at the 11th Havana Biennal (2012); Figures and Fictions at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London (2011); and The Dissolve, SITE Santa Fe, 8th International Biennial, Santa Fe, New Mexico, (2010).
Searle participated in the 2nd Johannesburg Biennale (1997), the 49th Venice Biennale (2001) and the 51st Venice Biennale (2005).
From 2024–2025, she was artist in residence at Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (MOCAA) as part of the museum’s Atelier programme. In 2019, Searle was artist in residence at the Maitland Institute, Cape Town and the featured artist at the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown (now Makhanda).
She won the Mbokodo Award in 2015 and was the recipient of the Rockefeller Bellagio Creative Artist Award for 2014. She was an Artes Mundi short-listed artist in Cardiff, Wales in 2004 and received the Standard Bank Young Artist Award for Visual Art in 2003. In 2000, Searle was awarded the Minister of Culture Prize at the Dakar Biennale. In 1998, she was awarded the UNESCO/AICA Award at the Cairo Biennale.