(Berni
Searle. Pic by Vanessa Cowling)
The National Arts Festival has announced
that its 2019 Featured Artist is Berni Searle, a visual artist based in Cape
Town.
Each year, the National Arts Festival
celebrates the work of a featured artist – a South African artist who has
consistently exhibited ground-breaking work and exceptional talent, shaping the
arts narrative of South Africa. The featured artist is showcased at the
Festival through retrospective and new works forming a snapshot of their career
over time. This year is the first time a visual artist has been honoured in
this way.
The National Arts Festival will run from June
27 and July 7, 2019, in Makhanda (formerly Grahamstown).
Searle, who was the Standard Bank Young
Artist for Visual Art in 2003, works predominantly with photography and the
moving image. She often exhibits installations where still photographic images
are combined with ephemeral materials and objects. In the case of video, her
work is often set up as multiple screen projections within discrete darkened
and enclosed spaces.
Searle regularly includes herself in her
work but performs only for the camera, producing performative works that
explore issues of self-representation, the relationship between personal and
collective identity and narratives connected to history, memory and place. Her
more recent work has a pervasive and growing sense of discontent, an expression
that mirrors the continuous cycle of protests and strikes across the country.
While her works are often explored in
dialogue with the socio-political legacy of South Africa and in relation to
current-day realities, her use of metaphor and poetic ambiguity transcend the
specificity of context, drawing on universal human emotions associated with
displacement, vulnerability and loss.
Commenting on the accolade Searle says, “I
am honoured to be invited to be the Featured Artist at this year’s National
Arts Festival. It has been 16 years since I exhibited in Grahamstown, as it was
known then, as the Standard Bank Young Artist. This was a seminal exhibition in
my development as an artist that also provided a national platform for the
exposure of my work at the time. I welcome the opportunity to present selected
work that I have made since then, as well as new commissioned work that speaks
to the focus on land at this year’s Festival and look forward to the engagement
with local audiences in Makhanda, as well as those further afield.”
Commenting on the choice of Searle as this
year’s Featured Artist, Executive Producer Ashraf Johaardien says, “The curated
programme of the 2019 National Arts Festival has the issue of land at its core.
Works selected for this year’s programme have thrown up notions of borders and
boundaries, cartography, geography and generally navigating the South African
landscape both in literal and metaphoric terms. So the curatorial decision to
invite Berni Searle to present on the programme as this year’s Featured Artist
emerged quite organically.”
According to South African History Online,
Searle “uses time-based media such as photography, video and film as a tool to
capture her work with performative narratives and the self as a figure to
embody history, land-memory and place”. In an article for Artthrob, Juliana
Irene Smith writes that Searle “has a relationship with the land and rituals of
the land.”
Says Johaardien, “It is fitting that in
this difficult time in our country, an artist of the depth and calibre of Berni
Searle will express a snapshot of a career that reflects on place and identity
under the National Arts Festival spotlight.”
Born in Cape Town in 1964, Searle has a
Masters degree from the University of Cape Town and has mounted solo
exhibitions in South Africa, Europe, and the United States. She has won a
number of awards including the Minister of Culture Prize at DAK’ART 2000,
Senegal; the Standard Bank Young Artist Award for Visual Art (South Africa
2003) and she was an Artes Mundi short-listed artist (Cardiff, Wales, 2004). In
2014 she was the Rockefeller Bellagio Creative Arts Fellow and in 2015 she won
the Mbokodo Award in the Visual Arts category.
Previous international exhibitions include
a.o. the 49th Venice Biennale (2001) and the 51st Venice Biennale (2005); Personal Affects, Power and Poetics in
Contemporary South African Art, at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine
(New York, 2004); Global Feminisms at
the Brooklyn Museum (New York, 2007); and New
Photography at the Museum of Modern Art (New York, 2007). More recently she
participated in Figures and Fictions
at the Victoria and Albert Museum (London, 2011); Pictures by Women: A History of Modern Photography at the Museum of
Modern Art (New York, 2011); Earth
Matters at the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution
(Washington DC, USA., 2014) and Distance
and Desire: Encounters with the African Archive at the Walther Collection,
Ulm, (Germany, 2014-2015).
Last year she was included in an exhibition
titled Social Work at Frieze London,
which featured eight monographic presentations by women artists whose work
emerged in response to the global social and political schisms of the 1980s and
’90s.
Searle has been Associate Professor at the
Michaelis School of Fine Art at the University of Cape Town for the past six
years, served as the school’s Director for the past two years and is currently
on sabbatical.
To link direct to the NAF site click on the
large banner that runs across the top of this blog or visit
https://www.nationalartsfestival.co.za or visit Facebook:
www.facebook.com/nationalartsfestival; Twitter: @artsfestival or Instagram:
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