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Berni Searle

Traces, 1999

Information

Location Gallery 2
Artist

Berni Searle

*1964, Cape Town, South Africa

lives and works in Cape Town, South Africa
Title Traces, 1999
From the series Colour Me, 1998-2000
Medium Digital print on transluscent paper, tumeric, paprika and ground cloves
Copyright Installation view PalaisPopulaire 2023 © Courtesy the artist, Photo: Mathias Schormann
Exhibition number AW103

Audio guide

In several works from the late 1990s Berni Searle is depicted naked dusted from head to toe with spices. The colour covering her skin varies, depending on the spice: there's paprika red, turmeric root yellow, or the brown of ground cloves. When she stands up, her body leaves a white imprint behind.

For Searle, the intense aroma of the spices conveys memories of family, ancestry and community. The spices represent the fusion of various culinary traditions, and the way food brings people together. Berni Searle was born and raised in Cape Town, which was an important refreshment station for the Dutch East India Company, which monopolised the spice trade through most of the 17th century. Today these spices are an important ingredient in the cuisine of the Cape Malays – descendants of slaves who were transported from the former Dutch colonies of Southeast Asia to South Africa.

With the colours of the spices on her skin and the scales she places beneath the images, the artist is alluding to the way the apartheid regime classified people by skin colour. Being assigned to a particular group determined where and how a person was allowed to live. For people of mixed heritage, like Searle, that was a particular challenge, because members of a single family were often classified differently.
"I think my work reflects different racial and political experiences – but I don't think my pieces are limited by that. They reflect a desire to present myself in various ways to counter the image that has been imposed on me. The presence and absence of the body in the work points to the idea that one's identity is not static and is constantly in flux." - Quote Berni Searle

Further artworks from this exhibition