Berni Searle: Recent Work 2007/8

BERNI SEARLE RECENT WORK 2007/8

BERNI SEARLE RECENT WORK 2007/8

BERNI SEARLE RECENT WORK 2007/8

WITH TEXTS BY MARION ARNOLD GABEBA BADEROON ANNIE E COOMBES TAMAR GARB GAVIN JANTJES TRACY MURINIK ELVIRA DYANGANI OSE

MICHAEL STEVENSON

Catalogue no 36 October 2008 Cover image A Fine Balance, 2008 (detail) Michael Stevenson Buchanan Building 160 Sir Lowry Road Woodstock 7925 Cape Town, South Africa Tel +27 (0)21 462 1500 info@michaelstevenson.com www.michaelstevenson.com Editor Sophie Perryer Design Gabrielle Guy Image repro Tony Meintjes, Ray du Toit Printing Hansa Print, Cape Town

CONTENTS

7

INTRODUCTION

8 BATHE

ACCOUNTING

BY GABEBA BADEROON

12 SPIRIT OF ‘76

SOUNDING THE ALARM

BY TRACY MURINIK

20 ONCE REMOVED

THE AMBIGUITY OF EVIDENCE

BY MARION ARNOLD

26 ALIBAMA

THE POETRY OF PLACE

BY TAMAR GARB

34 MUTE

THE SOUND OF SILENCE

BY ANNIE E COOMBES

40 SEEKING REFUGE

STRATEGIES FOR SURVIVAL

BY ELVIRA DYANGANI OSE

58 DAY FOR NIGHT

THINKING IN THE ROUND

BY GAVIN JANTJES

70 72

BIOGRAPHY ACKNOWLEDGMENTS PRODUCTION CREDITS

INTRODUCTION

Berni Searle: Recent Work 2007/8 is published following Searle’s fourth solo exhibition at Michael Stevenson (4 September – 11 October 2008), which included four new video pieces: Alibama,

SOPHIE PERRYER

Mute, Seeking Refuge and Day for Night, and related prints. The catalogue also extends beyond the exhibition, bringing together three works – Bathe, Spirit of ’76 and Once Removed – completed since Searle’s previous book, Approach (2006).

The fluid progression of these works is reflected in recurring imagery and concerns: the flow of water, the passage of time, the ebb of memory, the rise and fall of people and nations. As always Searle anchors her work firmly in her own cultural heritage, yet her lyrical and abstracted imagery transcends the specific to speak with resonance of belonging and displacement, nationalism and xenophobia.

Many of the works have links to places and people across the world. Spirit of ’76, commissioned by Philagrafika in Philadelphia, has Searle establishing a connection across centuries between that city, where the Declaration of Independence was signed in 1776, and the Soweto uprising in 1976. Alibama, Searle’s variation on the traditional Cape song as an embodiment of cultural memory, first screened as a work in progress at the University of South Florida’s Contemporary Art Museum in Tampa in 2006.

Seeking Refuge, made for Travesía at the Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno in Las Palmas, was inspired by the extreme landscape of the volcanic island of Lanzarote. Day for Night, commissioned for Stavanger’s 2008 European Capital of Culture programme, was shot in a disused lighthouse on the western coast of Norway.

In many respects, Mute stands as a counterpoint to these works.

A spontaneous and gut-felt response to the xenophobic violence that erupted in Searle’s home town and across South Africa earlier this year, its dark mood serves to tether the lyricism of the exhibition to the devastating realities experienced by vast numbers of people for whom ‘home’ is the most contested space of all.

7

BATHE

ACCOUNTING

The mother asked to stay.

GABEBA BADEROON

I was waiting for you.

She looked at her silent child.

The quiet of the girl’s face was a different quiet.

Her hands lay untouched by death.

The washer of bodies cut away her long, black dress.

Blue prayer beads fell to the floor in a slow accounting.

The washer of bodies began to sing

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Bathe 2007 Archival pigment ink on cotton rag paper Triptych, individual prints 112 x 145cm each Edition of 5 + 2AP

a prayer to mothers and daughters.

The mother said, who will wait for me.

From War Triptych: Silence, Glory, Love in Gabeba Baderoon, The Dream in the Next Body (Cape Town: Kwela/Snailpress, 2005).

Gabeba Baderoon is the author of the poetry collections The Dream in the Next Body (Cape Town: Kwela/Snailpress, 2005), The Museum of Ordinary Life (Stuttgart: DaimlerChrysler, 2005) and A Hundred Silences (Cape Town: Kwela/Snailpress, 2006). A Hundred Silences was a finalist for the 2007 Olive Schreiner Award and the 2007 University of Johannesburg Prize for Creative Writing. Baderoon received the DaimlerChrysler Award for South African Poetry in 2005. For 2008, she is a recipient of a fellowship from the Civitella Ranieri Foundation in Italy and the Wits Humanities Writer’s Residency at the University of Witwatersrand, sponsored by TrustAfrica.

9

Bathe

10

11

SPIRIT OF ’76

SOUNDING THE ALARM TRACY MURINIK

Berni Searle’s Spirit of ’76 begins subtly, gradually. A floating wheel of red, cut-out crêpe paper figures starts to bleed thin, spidery capillaries of colour into the water, and the vaguely discordant music accompanying its progress echoes its bleed.

A minute and twenty seconds into that progress, as swirling turrets reach the top of the image, Searle’s hands enter the frame to place a velvety black wreath of crêpe paper flowers around the figures, containing them. At first a smoky, then an inky black trail forms as the flowers take in water, progressively infusing the pinky red of the figures. The bleed continues slowly.

At a point when the figures have been drained of their colour almost entirely – ethereal, they still float above the rest of the inner frame, now engulfed by shadow – the movement of the

12

Spirit of ’76 2007 HD digital video, single-channel projection Duration 6 mins 24 secs, sound Edition of 5 + 2AP

water shifts and hastens and, like a type of vortex, sucks them in.

Searle’s video was commissioned and produced for the printmaking initiative Philagraphika for the project Re:Print Re:Present Re:View, curated by Salah Hassan, at the Temple Gallery, Philadelphia, in 2007. Referencing the history of that city as the ‘Cradle of Liberty’, as it is often referred to, Searle images a trio of figures, echoed on either side of the crêpe paper wheel, which she has lifted from the iconic American patriotic painting, The Spirit of ’76 by Archibald M Willard, painted in 1875. It is said to be the most reproduced painting – appearing in multiple formats and media – in the United States. For her purposes Searle has appropriated the central motif of the work, the three minstrels who lead the march towards liberation.

The soundtrack that runs concurrently through the work is similarly an altered rendition, in this case of a section of Richard Wagner’s American Centennial March, commissioned in 1876 by the city of Philadelphia in honour of the centenary of US independence. Not unlike what has been done to the three figures

13

Spirit of ’76

Searle represents visually, the music, too, has been stripped down

Interestingly, but also perhaps chillingly, if the centre literally

to a type of relatively blank silhouette of itself: Searle states that

cannot hold in the video piece, it is only a pink rosette,

she purposely selected ‘the most un-dramatic part, slowed it

surrounded by flakes of what it once anchored, that remains

down, duplicated it, taking the pitch out of one and leaving the

intact: a flamboyant marker of loss.

pitch in the other and then playing them simultaneously, phasing them in and out of each other, haunting and distorted’. The effect of this intervention is a mood that is brooding and ominous: the music feels nostalgic but melancholy – it invokes a sense of faded splendour, insipid drama – something that once had but has now lost momentum. It plays as a hollow memory of itself.

For American audiences, particularly in Philadelphia, the references to the Willard painting and to the themes of liberty and independence would be clear. And in that vein the work, in the context of the exhibition, was largely site-specific. However, the imagery that it presents – the flag, the rosette, the wreath – can be read almost universally. These are items of veneration, of 14

military significance, inferences of victory. But they may also be commemorative and memorial markers of loss. Searle’s piece feels like a commentary on a loss or fading of liberty, or maybe a warning. Whether for an American public whose nationalism is premised on the ideals of liberty and independence encapsulated in the Declaration for Independence of 1776, or for a young democracy like South Africa, for whom 1976 and the Soweto uprising are such significant markers of the fight for liberation, Searle’s piece sounds the alarm as to the solidity of these ideals and their future in current times. There is significant risk of dissipation and ultimately oblivion here.

What begins, in Searle’s video, as a progressive fading – a slow bleed, and a gradual infusion of shadow – becomes a complete and all-consuming erosion. The small amount of detail that existed in the figures of liberation melts further and further into obscurity as the bleed through the water progresses. They become bleached, fragile and eventually broken traces of what they once represented.

Tracy Murinik is a writer and curator based in Johannesburg and Cape Town.

15

Spirit of ’76

16

17

Spirit of ’76

18

19

ONCE REMOVED

THE AMBIGUITY OF EVIDENCE

There are three photographs of a draped half-length body with the hands clasped across it. The heavily veiled head wears a wreath of black flowers. Then there are three photographs of a wrapped

MARION ARNOLD

lower body with the hands holding a bouquet of black flowers. The passage of time is evident in Once Removed (Head) and (Lap) but what is removed from what, and why ‘once removed’?

Among the infinitely satisfying characteristics of Berni Searle’s works are their enigmatic quality and non-prescriptive titles.

Searle constructs images, offers signs to facilitate interpretation and invites viewer contemplation but she is not and never has been a didactic artist. Poetics, not politics, are her primary concern. Of course her work has political resonance; it originates from a particular historical and geopolitical context and is surrounded by written and spoken discourses. Searle is an artist but that essential description is extended by identity politics – she is South African, of mixed race, female. These dimensions of her

20

being contribute to Searle’s creative vision but do not control it. Once removed from imposed classifications, artists should express individual energy and ideas and Searle does just this, engaging with human concerns not the clamour of breaking news and politico-babble that punctuate daily life.

One of the many cruelties apartheid imposed on South African artists in the late 20th century was to keep them focused on the political role of culture during the struggle. Post-1994, South African artists were free to use and value the flight of the imagination and, once removed from the restrictive boundaries of a narrow, unjust and embattled society, they could reconnect with the world. Searle has stretched her mental and physical horizons and she locates concepts that have global relevance.

As she attains her distinctive, mature artistic identity it is clear that she cherishes visual art’s capacity to activate the beholders’ meditative and intellectual responses. While her video projections do this through filmic techniques and viewers experience her

images moving in time, her digital prints function as still, silent

individuality and belong to an active woman who has adopted a

objects. Here the artist is meticulous about presentation (scale,

pose of patent endurance. Time passes, water trickles, pristine

paper texture, tonalities, colours) and acutely sensitive to visual

white paper-cloth is contaminated by black dye bleeding into

details which build and sustain meaning, and retain our attention.

it. The wreath/garland, once a dominant presence, vanishes, its

So what do we see and how do we think when confronted with

absence visible through dark residues.

Once Removed (Head) and Once Removed (Lap)?

In Lap we are further removed from the body form. Distanced For South African viewers, black, white and brown are racial

and looking down not across, we see real feet. Like the thinking

signifiers denoting a recent human history and an ongoing

head containing the brain of homo sapiens, the feet denote the

preoccupation with historical and cultural difference. But visually

being which became human as it rose from four legs and walked

black, white and brown are colours imbued with optical and

in measured strides. Here the human figure merely sits and waits

symbolic significance. Black is dark, white is light, and brown –

as the robust, triangular bouquet of black flowers, covering and

brown is the magic hue in-between. Mixed from three primary

alluding to the pubic area, disintegrates wetly, staining the white

colours, brown asserts itself as warm and life-affirming. In Head

pulp. Once it is removed, only dark traces remain and the hands

and Lap we confront a brown body (we deduce that the figure is

are released for renewed action.

a woman from the rounded forms and the fact that women are veiled and socially invisible in many societies), but the face and

Prominent though black and white are in Head and Lap, the images

sexual signifiers are concealed. The body is draped in wet, white

speak not about absolutes and oppositions but about fusion.

paper pulp resembling a heavy veil over the head and chest, and

Something new is created. White light fractured and three primary

a wraparound skirt from waist to mid-calves. This non-eroticised

colours produced brown. Black objects and white objects combined

body is removed from a context; positioned against white space

to generate pattern made over a period of time with technical skill

it is like a specimen on display. Devoid of background information

and conceptual intentionality to invite the construction of meaning.

the divided woman offers herself for scrutiny and we look at Head and Lap separated from one another. Without a face the

Time passes, stuff happens, things and people change. The

woman lacks individual identity and our possible routes of inquiry

camera stops clicking, the model moves again, the wreath and

are restricted to interpreting colour symbolism and paper flowers

bouquet vanish. We cease to look and go about the difficulties of

which seemingly decay, leaving only the stains of their presence.

living. But once removed from the experience of contemplating art something is lodged in the visual memory, and when retrieved

In the West, white signifies purity but in the East it is the colour

from this personal archive it reminds us of art’s transformative

of mourning. The flowers, wreath and bouquet, resemble the

power. Berni Searle shapes and reshapes our consciousness of

succulent Aeonium ‘Zwartkop’ but, fashioned from black crêpe

big human issues – life, change, death.

paper, they are funereal in their dark intensity. The signs of mourning, rendered cross-culturally, are strong. In Head, the body’s pose is one of passivity and resignation but look closely at the hands – the nails, knuckles and stained skin denote

Marion Arnold is a lecturer in the School of Art and Design, Loughborough University, United Kingdom, and formerly taught at the University of South Africa and the University of Stellenbosch. She is also a practising artist.

21

Once Removed

22

Once Removed (Head) 2008 Archival pigment ink on cotton rag paper Triptych, individual prints 112 x 95cm each Edition of 5 + 2AP

23

Once Removed

24

Once Removed (Lap) 2008 Archival pigment ink on cotton rag paper Triptych, individual prints 112 x 95cm each Edition of 5 + 2AP

25

ALIBAMA

THE POETRY OF PLACE

From the opening frame of Alibama, the sonorous voice of a lone male chorister is heard singing the familiar words of Daar Kom die Alibama, here made strange by the precision and clarity of the

TAMAR GARB

diction and the slowed-down distillation of the beautiful melody.

Like a dirge or a lamentation, the haunting sound of the song washes over the image of a woman and a boy, bathed in evening light, their presences brushed by waving black ribbons blowing suggestively in front of them. The figures appear only for some twenty seconds – after this their vantage point will be implied not staged – but the ribbons will come and go throughout the sixminute film, providing, like the song itself, a connecting motif that frames and structures the piece.

Alibama is conceived in two distinct parts, separated, almost halfway through, by a violent rupture or explosion that is both

26

Alibama 2008 HD digital video, single-channel projection Duration 6 mins 20 secs, sound Edition of 5 + 2AP

sonically and visually inscribed. The first section of the film comprises a slow-moving and spectacular panoramic take of Table Bay, stretching from Signal Hill (which emerges gradually, as if from some primordial sea, to greet the clear blue sky) to Devil’s Peak, and takes in the mythic setting of the ocean at sunset, the boats in the bay, Robben Island and the fading horizon beyond. Moving from left to right, the camera pans the view with a lingering, sweeping slowness as the harmonising voices of a Malay choir join in the singing. The scene is breathtakingly beautiful – almost too beautiful, even unbearably so.

As the camera approaches the end of its panoramic sweep and the strains of the chorus reach their climax, the landscape erupts, replaced by the fleeting still of the barrel of a gun and the resounding bang of cannon-fire, which brutally ends the pleasurable scene and its choral accompaniment. This is the startling sound of the noonday gun, the oldest functioning cannon in the world, which still booms daily over Cape Town. Its mode of address is public, official, authoritarian. It tells the time with military precision: non-negotiable and coercive.

27

Alibama

In the context of Alibama it acts as a caesura or censor which

copies and repeats, learning his lesson in the amniotic space of

punctures the languid pace of sound and scene and disrupts

the tub, bathed by the mother’s voice.

the unhurried tempo of reverie and folksong. It works here as an intrusive reminder of past battles and brutalities, of naval

The use of the Afrikaans song in both these guises is

conflicts and colonial settlements, inserting violence into the

poignant. It registers the fluidity of folklore, its adaptability

picturesque and doubt into the poetics of nostalgia. After

and changeability as well as its internalisation as memory and

its devastating blow, we change register, moving from the

myth. From the start of Alibama, the song is appropriated and

spectacular and epic to the intimate and personal. Now, rather

altered to serve the ends of the film. Traditionally sung by

than witnessing the legendary picture-postcard view laid out

minstrels and choirs and regularly performed at the annual

cinematically before us, we become interlopers in a private world.

Cape Town Minstrel Carnival – still, controversially, called

Boats, streamers, water and song still remain the key elements

the ‘Coon Carnival’ – when it is often accompanied by the

here. But the grand narratives of mountain and ocean, mainland

characteristic ramkiekie, the song is traditionally linked to jollity,

and island, memory and folklore are distilled and transformed in

celebration and the carnivalesque. Its associations are often

the ritualised play of a woman and child.

with the stereotypical image of the ‘Cape Coloured’: a drunken buffoon whose primitive instruments and simple songs testify

28

In the second part of the film, a small folded red paper boat

to a debased culture born of miscegenation and abuse. At best

is released in a bath of water, seen from above, together with

the stereotype conjures a determinedly happy figure whose

the black streamers which have wafted periodically over our

‘colourful’ language and warm effusiveness are seen to be

picture throughout the panoramic view. In the first section, the

expressed in local songs and sayings. It is these characteristic

streamers are hand-held – we see the hand that holds them in

associations – negative and positive – that Searle refuses, both

one fleeting frame – and reminiscent of ceremonial farewells

in the melancholic but monumental rendering of Daar Kom die

to ocean liners from docks and harbours. Waving in the wind,

Alibama which accompanies the heart-rending landscape, and in

they materialise the connection between shore-bound subjects

the fragile incantations of the domestic setting. The wresting of

and sea-borne ships, seeming to prolong farewells and delay

the song from its usual rendition makes one attend to it anew.

departures at the same time as symbolising the longings and

Not only does the leisurely pacing of the tune reveal its hard-

dreams that the far-reaching view over the ocean traditionally

won beauty, but the clearly enunciated lyrics, whether in the

heralds. In the shallow water, the delicate floating forms lose

voice of the chorister, the choir, the mother or the child, make

their separate identities. As the dye from the crêpe paper seeps

us attend to its enigmatic meanings as never before.

into the liquid, the contours of the boat and streamers slowly disappear and become swallowed in a sea of seeping colours

The origins of Daar Kom die Alibama are contested. One theory

and gradually staining fluid. Accompanying the liquefaction of

is that the ‘Alibama’ refers to a US confederate raiding ship,

boat and streamer is the song Daar Kom die Alibama, which

the ‘CSS Alabama’, which sailed into Table Bay in the early

had provided the full-bodied and mellifluous soundtrack for the

1860s. Built in England in 1862, the boat docked twice at the

panning shot, but now is recorded in the faltering tones of a lone

Cape in the following two years but was destroyed in a famous

woman joined by the mimicking sounds of a young child who

sea battle off Cherbourg in 1864. It is certainly possible that

29

Alibama

the ship entered into local mythology and became laden with romantic associations of far-off places and distant lands. But its journeys between America and Europe, around Africa and over the Indian Ocean, also make it an inadvertent reference point for imperial and colonial travel routes while its association with the Confederate support for the slave trade gives it a potent symbolic significance in the context of the history of the Cape. The second verse of the song seems to point to another putative origin, that is to a local boat called the ‘Alabama’ that brought thatching reeds to Cape Town from St Helena Bay. ‘Nooi, nooi, die rietkooi nooi, die rietkooi is gemaak; die rietkooi is vir my/jou [versions differ] gemaak om daarop te slaap’ go the words, invoking the thatch mats that were the traditional beds for servants in colonial times. One theory is that the bundles of reeds were used in the manufacture of beds intended for Cape Malay brides and that a traditional choir would view the ‘Alabama bed’ covered in white and silver spreads to the 30

accompaniment of the folk song.

Both verses seem to be linked, therefore, to local oral histories, which echo over the mountainside and accrue new meanings in the reverberations and distillations of time: ‘Januarie, Februarie, March, April, May, June, July ...’ intone the choristers marking out the measurement of the year in well-tried units much as the noonday gun punctures the day with clockwork regularity.

But human time and history cannot be fully contained in such structures. The narrating and chanting of the past, its melodies and strains, spill out of the boundaries of fact and into the everregenerating realms of fantasy. It is thus that we learn who we are, in the fold of the mother’s voice, itself enmeshed with the thick textures and tinctures of experience. The final shot of Alibama allows for the gradual merging of the dye-filled water with the picturesque view of the bay. The loaded site of history is overlaid by the lilting strains of a lullaby marking the margin between wakefulness and sleep, spectacle and dream.

Tamar Garb is Durning Lawrence Professor in History of Art, University College London. She curated the exhibition Home Lands/Land Marks at Haunch of Venison, London, in 2008, accompanied by a catalogue which includes her essay ‘A land of signs’. Her publications include The Painted Face: Portraits of women in France, 1814-1914 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007) and Bodies of Modernity: Figure and flesh in fin de siècle France (London: Thames & Hudson, 1998).

31

Alibama

32

33

MUTE

THE SOUND OF SILENCE

‘The actions of a few have shamed us all. They shame the words and deeds that gave birth to our young democracy. We deserve better. South Africa deserves better. And most of all, those who

ANNIE E COOMBES

seek shelter and safety in our country deserve better.’1 No soundtrack to guide us, we peer at a barely illuminated screen with silence pounding in our ears. Searle is a mistress of the art of defamiliarisation and the sense of the uncanny provoked by the tension between absence and presence.2 She makes her audience work, clutching at straws to find recognisable forms where formlessness and ambiguity prevail. We are curious to know what is enfolded in the gloom of this urban night scene but simultaneously we fear its disclosure. Already the apparent banality of the scene has more in common with Freud’s anxious object. Searle’s choice of found images foregrounds the gap

34

Mute 2008 SD digital video, double-channel projection Duration 4 mins 11 secs, no sound Edition of 5 + 2AP

between evidence and representation and exposes the fine line distinguishing the familiar from that alienated space of unrecoverable distance that is Freud’s unheimlich.

Figures seemingly sweeping away debris on the city’s streets mutate in slow motion into white police. Their ‘brooms’ exchanged for guns. Torches light our view of a curbside with a black man turning towards us – conjuring racial confrontations from apartheid’s archive. But this is a racial conflict of another kind. As the man turns further an officer’s torchlight catches the reflective surface on what turns out to be body armour. Identified as police, he is now one of four in the frame. He has turned towards us in order to chalk the outline of a figure at the scene of a hideous crime. Though no body is visible the sinister remnants of ash and smoke drift into view.

It is no accident that Searle’s earlier version of the two-screen presentation Mute was produced in May 2008. Beginning on the 11th of that month xenophobic violence and cries of ‘hambani makwerewere’ (go away foreigners) spread from Alexandra

35

Mute

Township through Gauteng to Bophelong, Kagiso, Joburg

disadvantaged. The same month violence erupted in Gauteng,

Central, Thokoza and Reiger Park and from there throughout the

Italian mobs destroyed the displaced Roma’s makeshift homes in

country to Mpumalanga, Durban, Knysna, and the Eastern and

the squatter camps outside Naples, demanding their deportation

Western Cape. Back in 2004 on the tenth anniversary of the first

in direct contravention of the EU Schengen agreement, and

democratic elections, Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu had

Britain’s immigration detention centres reveal alarming statistics

warned the audience at his Nelson Mandela Memorial Lecture

of self harm amongst inmates.4 The Washington Post recently

that South Africa was an explosion waiting to happen if nothing

ran a series exposing abuses of immigrants in detention in the

was done to bridge the expanding gap between rich and poor.

United States.5

For many analysts the brutality which erupted in May confirmed Tutu’s prediction.

The thuggery brought Winnie Madikizela-Mandela’s tearful face to television screens across the nation as she apologised to

36

It seems that every tragedy has its iconic legacy and South

foreigners. In Mute, Searle’s face attempts a more complex move.

Africa’s shame was disseminated in the world’s press via the

It is the vulnerable expression of a shame which she forces us

gruesome photograph of Ernesto Alphabeto Nhamwavane,

to share by holding the viewer in her gaze as she witnesses the

a 22-year-old Mozambican bricklayer who had been beaten

dissolution of the South African dream – that bloodless transition

and set on fire by a machete-wielding mob. He died on arrival

to democracy built on the recognition of an international

at hospital. Searle’s poignant re-use of Benny Gool’s images

solidarity and a common humanity amongst the marginalised and

taken during the outbreak of violence can’t help but recall

politically dispossessed and their champions. If shame inevitably

Nhamwavane’s fate and that of others like him – migrants

signals a crisis of identity where distinctions between subject

targeted by mob violence in South Africa, having already

and object become blurred, it may also be the point at which an

fled torture and intimidation in the aftermath of civil war

individual ‘owns’ the nation’s failure to live up to its ideal, thus

or famine in Somalia and Congo or from Robert Mugabe’s

‘confirm[ing] the subject’s love for the nation. In other words,

desperate and terrorising attempts to keep the Movement

shame can become a form of identification in the very failure of

for Democratic Change (MDC) from reclaiming their election

an identity to embody an ideal.’6

victory in Zimbabwe. It will be forever to South Africa’s shame 3

that as the supporters of the MDC opposition leader Morgan

Gool’s photographs loop continuously, replaying the awful truth of

Tsvangirai were being killed and mutilated, Thabo Mbeki refused

a body’s torched remains, while on the screen opposite, Searle’s

to publicly condemn Mugabe and persisted with his ineffectual

face reluctantly registers the implications of the scene. Like a

strategy of ‘quiet diplomacy’, while in the streets South Africans

child unwilling to expose her tears, a sleeve impatiently wipes

compounded the violence to their African brothers and sisters

away the evidence of untidy crying that stains her cheeks until

by routing Zimbabwean refugees.

distress overwhelms her. The bleeding crosses put some distance between viewer and viewed and mediate any trace of narcissistic

But it is a shame we all share. South Africa is not the only nation

empathy in Searle’s tears, but the promise of redemption is

where foreigners have been recently scapegoated for the

painfully withheld. Tears may be a form of confession through

failure of economic policies to deliver benefits to the poor and

exposure but there is no easy absolution here.

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Mute

Shame is often colloquially described as a loss of face and a loss of voice. Mute is a brave piece – outspoken in its silence.

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1 Full-page notice in the Sunday Times, May 25 2008, p27. Signed Sunday Times, The Times, Sowetan, Sunday World, Weekend Post, The Herald and Daily Dispatch.

2 I have elaborated on this aspect of Searle’s work in an earlier essay commissioned by the South African National Gallery, Annie E Coombes, ‘Memories are Made of This’ in Fresh: Berni Searle (Cape Town: South African National Gallery, 2003).

3 See Treatment Action Campaign’s extensive report on refugees in South Africa at http://www.tac.org.za/community/files/file/et25.pdf 4 http://www.ncadc.org.uk/resources/self-harm2006.html. See also http:// www.medicaljustice.org.uk/ and http://www.barbedwire britain.org.uk/ United Against Racism have also documented deaths of those trying to escape to ‘Fortress Europe’. See http://www.unitedagainst racism.org/pdfs/ actual_listofdeath.pdf. For a more analytical international exposé see the special issue on women asylum seekers and refugees in Amal Treacher, Annie E Coombes, Claire Alexander, Lucy Bland and Pam Alldred (eds), Feminist Review, Special Issue on Exile and Asylum, No 73, 2003. See also T Hayter, Open Borders: The Case Against Immigration Controls (London: Pluto Press, 2000).

5 See http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/nation/specials/immigration/ 6 Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004), 108. See also Helen Merrell Lynd, On Shame and the Search for Identity (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1958) and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003).

Annie E Coombes is Professor of Material and Visual Culture in the School of History of Art, Film and Visual Media at Birkbeck College, University of London. She is the author of many publications on South African art and culture including History After Apartheid: Visual Culture and Public Memory in a Democratic South Africa (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), winner of the inaugural book award from the Council on Public History.

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SEEKING REFUGE

STRATEGIES FOR SURVIVAL

The first time I visited Fuerteventura, one of the seven Canary Islands, it occurred to me that volcanic soil, arid and barren, had a peculiar relationship with the equatorial forest. The crushing vacuum of the one brought up inevitable reminders of the exuberance of

ELVIRA DYANGANI OSE

the other, without my really knowing the reason. Both places are inconceivable for the human eye to grasp; they are spaces beyond our comprehension, sublime scenarios. This doesn’t happen when you repeat the journey, however. Even though your sight is lost for hours in the rough lava of Tindaya or Triquivijate, you never perceive this place as you did the first time you felt the impact of its desert.

On that first trip, I visited the plains of Gran Tarajal. I travelled on foot through many of the areas where harragas, ‘landless’ immigrants, would have stripped off their wet clothes in the middle of the night and tried to hide from the naval authorities.

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Seeking Refuge 2008 SD digital video, single-channel projection Duration 5 mins 56 secs, sound Edition of 5 + 2AP

There would have been no trace of other human beings for several miles around. At their backs there was the sea, memory; in front of them, an unknown land and uncertainty. Subsequently, I have imagined the feeling of abandonment of those who beached on those shores, confused and in search of refuge. I imagined their first impressions, their panic, their anxiety ...

In Seeking Refuge, Berni Searle portrays that moment in a powerfully lyrical manner.

The video begins with a metaphor as beautiful as it is dramatic.

The horizon, that line pursued relentlessly by anyone who begins a passage, is almost imperceptible beyond a black veil that flutters in the wind. It is reminiscent of a past that refuses to go away, a past to which the hands of Searle’s protagonist cling. She is no longer alone on this journey. The arms that hold the veil are coloured an intense crimson red. So are her feet, which the camera shows us a few seconds later. She has come to shore. For a moment, the deafening wind silences the sea, but not the land, which cracks at every step. Sand, stone, salt – we move away from

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Seeking Refuge

the shore as this character guides us along a mysterious crossing.

In Seeking Refuge we accompany Searle’s protagonist as

Now, as spectators, we are also involved in her trip.

she arrives on the island of Lanzarote. The boldness of the environment made an impression on the artist on her first visit

Searle has always forced the viewer to confront the intrigue that

there. Her work interrogates the living conditions within that

surrounds her characters. Less perturbing than her video installation

territory, as well as the traditional ways in which some of its natural

Home and Away (2003), in which a woman’s body floats and drifts

resources have been exploited. There are three elements to

in the Mediterranean Sea, Seeking Refuge keeps us caught in

Lanzarote’s landscape which are of critical importance in this piece:

the tension of a character whose wandering path gives life to an

the black volcanic soil and calcified sea salt that villagers use for its

unperturbed landscape. Seeking Refuge is Searle’s response to an

benefits; the Geria, an area given over to a cultivation system that

invitation by the Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno, in Las Palmas

hides and protects the grapevine from adverse weather and gives

de Gran Canaria, to participate in Travesía (Crossing), an exhibition

the island’s landscape its peculiar architecture; and the cochinilla

reflecting on losses, meetings and misunderstandings within the

or quermes, an insect that lives on the tuneras (local cactus) and

experience of migration. As in Home and Away, Searle expresses

contains large amounts of crimson acid, an excellent natural ink.

a firm commitment to the time and place of that experience. If

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left there alone, the actor and spectator would be drowned in a

This is not the first time that Searle has dyed her body. But if

harrowing destiny without end. Yet here the artist shows, without

in previous series like Colour Me (1998-2000) or Discoloured

lifting the suspense, a more positive dimension. Her work explores at

(1999) Searle painted her body or delimited her absence to

once the most daunting aspects and the promise of migration.

explore ‘the limitations of such essentializing positions and … the necessarily messy and complicated mixings that have produced

Migratory movements are one of modernity’s paradigms.

all contemporary societies’,1 in Seeking Refuge she uses the red

Throughout the 20th century, uneven economic flows, local

ink extracted from the cochinilla to proclaim, through each step

wars and dictatorial political regimes have given rise to massive

on this new land, her belonging to it. It’s a beautiful metaphor of

demographic shifts – particularly but not only in the most

the émigré as a transcultural character to whom any territory may

depressed parts of the globe, south to north. Historically the Canary

belong inexorably. Undoubtedly there are still contradictions in

Islands have been a crossroads, a land of émigrés. Many Canarians

the legal status that applies to immigrants on the islands, but here

emigrate to South America, and, as an inevitable step to America

Searle places them in a distinctive landscape – the black sand dune

or Africa from Europe, the islands have seen generations of men

– where, like the vine in the Geria, the protagonist is able to find her

and women arriving on or leaving their shores in hope of a better

final place of rest.

life. Migration always happens both ways, in and out of the islands.

Because of its geographical position as a strategic enclave between territories, the archipelago has become a temporary destination for many African emigrants. Many die in the Atlantic Ocean or wander disoriented in their new cities. Artistic interventions explore the human aspects of these tragic events. By putting players in the foreground, artists rescue these stories from oblivion.

1 Annie E Coombes, History After Apartheid. Visual Culture and Public Memory in a Democratic South Africa (Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2004), p250 Elvira Dyangani Ose is an independent curator and art and architectural historian. Currently, she is a graduate student in History of Art and Visual Studies at Cornell University, New York.

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Seeking Refuge series 2008 Archival pigment ink on cotton rag paper 112 x 154cm each Editions of 5 + 2AP

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Facing page: Voyage Page 50: Flight Page 51: Parched

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Facing page: On Foot

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Page 54: Looking Back Page 55: Enclose

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Enfold

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DAY FOR NIGHT

THINKING IN THE ROUND

The challenge for the viewer of all Berni Searle’s works is the thought processes they set in motion and the emotional play they make through their strong visuals. One has to think one’s way

GAVIN JANTJES

beyond and through the images she places into our visual realm.

There are few narratives. Most are metaphors for events in our world and for the emotions associated with memory. Her video installations and photographs are not impossible to navigate, and the trail of small textual and visual clues she leaves for the viewer indicates pathways to the events she has chosen as her subject.

In her four-channel video installation Day for Night (2008), the title provides the first clue. Something is being swapped, inverted – altered. In early filmmaking night scenes were shot during daytime and made to look like night using a technique called ‘day for night’. But Searle has not used this false impression of

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Day for Night 2008 HD digital video, four-channel projection Duration 6 mins 40 secs, sound Edition of 5 + 2AP

reality to make her work. She filmed at dusk during a Norwegian summer. The four screens establish a 360 degree view from a disused lighthouse in the Stavanger fjord on Norway’s western coast. The soundtrack and rotation of these videos position the viewer in a different world, whose alterity sharpens concentration and one’s visual focus. One sees day pass into night and back again in a fleeting sequence of rotations that collapse four hours into five short minutes. Norway has a different sense of time to most places and this installation pushes the drama of that difference to the forefront. Eighteen hours of summer daylight turn into nights of the same length in winter. But this first reading of clues provides initial background information about a country whose ever-increasing oil wealth has brought substantial changes to tradition. They set an almost exotic scene for a work by an artist from Africa who is not unfamiliar with a landscape of mountains, coast and ocean.

The key metaphor however is light and it references both science and culture, opening this work to many possible readings. The lighthouse was once a key element in coastal navigation. It could

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Day for Night

signal a red light to warning maritime travellers. But its main task

projections, its red shimmer is carried into the encroaching

was to project a pulse of light deep into the southern night that

darkness. Shot through a transparent filter of red cellophane to

provided a fixed, stable point on the map – a brief moment of

imitate the red Perspex warning strip of the lighthouse, the colour

certainty in a floating world.

signals an ominous change. Searle also inserts the exhaust flame of an oil refinery onto the smaller modern beacon at the water’s

Light is also a sign for knowledge, thought and spirituality.

edge. This reduction of natural sunlight and its replacement with

Most importantly light is the basis for all visual communication

a gaseous, industrial flame moves the work’s ideas towards issues

in film and video. Searle’s videos and carefully composed still

of industrial pollution and global warming.

photographs are addressed to the viewer’s intellect. She has

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replaced the light source of the old lighthouse at Obrestad, near

Her subtle mixing of sounds from the deep ocean with orchestral

Stavanger, with her video camera. Instead of projecting light, her

trumpets and brass underscores the elemental power of our

camera gathers it to record the world immediately around and

planet. A loud warning fog horn and the hiss of the ever-

inside the elevated tower. The glass prism reflector that normally

increasing oil refinery flame establish an aural and visual

spreads light beams in all directions now inverts what the camera

uncertainty. No boat or oil tanker is seen in the endlessly rotating

sees. The slow camera pan gathers inverted images. Looking

panorama but the threat that one is about to run adrift in the

south from Norway’s western shore is looking at the world upside

darkness is ever present. Taken together, these many metaphoric

down, an imaginary inversion of the world map. Her camera’s lens

clues trace no clear narrative pathway toward a particular event.

maps the small harbour landscape with its modest and modern

The atmosphere of Day for Night fluctuates from tranquillity

light beacon and records the interior of the old tower’s projection

to threat and back, as the light of day gives way to red-tinted

room. One recognises a black and white photograph hanging

night. Its detached feel invites one to measure once-stable

on the tower’s interior wall. This fragment of memory recorded

realities against today’s ecological and economic uncertainty.

what the world of Obrestad once looked like. Small rowing boats

The scramble is already underway to control both the northern

resting on the shore suggest a once rural, coastal existence when

passage, now open because of global warming, and the mining

locals lived off the land, fishing and farming. Today that way of life

wealth beneath the melting ice. Day for Night functions like a

has been forced to give way to a booming oil industry. As the view

stable beacon in culture. It points to a reality that can tilt toward

shifts from inside to out, one sees the same rugged coast. Searle

ecological disaster if we are not willing to engage it with thought

herself walks into the scene and stops at the red barrier of the

and action.

tower balcony to observe a landscape now depleted of boats. Her role as an artist is clear. She is witness, messenger and visionary and her message could be, ‘I have seen this and I want to share it with you.’

Life in this northern region has changed – and dramatic change is predicted for its future. As the sun sets in Searle’s four

Gavin Jantjes is Curator at the National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design in Oslo, Norway.

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Room with a View 2008 Archival pigment ink on cotton rag paper Triptych, individual prints 61 x 44cm, 61 x 79cm and 61 x 44cm Edition of 3 + 1AP

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Day for Night

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A Fine Balance 2008 Archival pigment ink on cotton rag paper 112 x 141cm Edition of 3 + 1AP

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BIOGRAPHY

Berni Searle was born in 1964 in Cape Town, where she continues to live and work. She has held four solo exhibitions at Michael Stevenson: Recent Work in 2008, Crush in 2006, About to Forget in 2005 and Vapour in 2004. Searle has had survey exhibitions at Johannesburg Art Gallery (2006) and the Contemporary Art Museum, University of South Florida (2006), travelling to the Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois (2007). She was one of three artists selected for the annual New Photography exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 2007. Group exhibitions in 2007/8 include Travesía at the Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno, Las Palmas, Canary Islands; Home Lands/Land Marks at Haunch of Venison, London; Black Womanhood: Images, Icons, and Ideologies of the African Body at the Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, and other venues in the United States; Bare Life at the Museum on the Seam, Jerusalem, Israel; Apartheid: The South African Mirror at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona, Spain; and Global Feminisms at the Elizabeth A Sackler Centre, Brooklyn Museum, New York.

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Searle was included on the 1997 Johannesburg Biennale, the 1998 Cairo Biennale, and the 2001 and 2005 Venice Biennales, and will participate in the 10th Havana Biennale in 2009.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank Michael Stevenson and the entire staff at the gallery for their continued assistance, and in particular Sophie Perryer for her involvement in creating this catalogue.

BERNI SEARLE Alibama was originally commissioned and produced for a solo exhibition, Approach, at the University of South Florida’s Contemporary Art Museum, Tampa, in 2006. I would like to thank Glen Thomas for his assistance as camera person and editor in the reworking of this piece, as well as the demonstration choir of the Cape Malay Choir Board for their rendition of Daar Kom die Alibama.

The production of Day for Night presented a number of challenges. I would like to thank Glen Thomas for travelling to Norway, and for his camera and editing assistance on my most highly technical project to date.

Seeking Refuge and related prints were shot on location in the Canary Islands. I would like to thank my guide, Manuel Perezmilian, for sharing his knowledge of Lanzarote and particularly for his help with shooting parts of the video. I would like to thank Tony Meintjes for travelling to the island with a large format camera, shooting under challenging conditions and producing the most exquisite prints. I would also like to thank Flora Barrow for all her assistance, which included patiently painting and repainting shoes on my feet and gloves on my hands. The experience of producing this body of work has made it one of the most fulfilling projects I have ever worked on.

Mute was made in a short period of time, during the xenophobic attacks that took place across South Africa in May this year. With a shared conviction that as much needed to be done to voice concern about and opposition to these developments, various people assisted. I would especially like to thank my brother George Searle for organising the shoot and introducing me to Benny Gool, whose documentary photographs have been incorporated into the work. I would also like to thank Ronet van der Walt for editing at short notice and Jean Brundrit for additional still images.

I would like to thank the writers who share their insights into the work published in this catalogue, enriching and extending my own understanding of some of the complexities at play.

Lastly, I would like to thank the commissioning institutions who made the production of new work possible.

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PRODUCTION CREDITS

Bathe Photo-credit: Tony Meintjes Spirit of ’76 Commissioned by Philagraphika, Philadelphia, for the exhibition Re:Print Re:Present Re:View, curated by Salah Hassan Camera and editing: Glen Thomas Once Removed (Head) and Once Removed (Lap) Photo-credit: Tony Meintjes Alibama Originally commissioned by USF Contemporary Art Museum I Institute for Research in Art, Tampa, Florida Camera and editing: Glen Thomas Daar Kom die Alibama sung by the Cape Malay Board’s demonstration choir, and by Rizano Snyders and Berni Searle Mute Documentary photographs: Benny Gool Editing: Ronet van der Walt Additional images, photo-credit: Jean Brundrit

72 Seeking Refuge Commissioned by the Centro Atlántico de Arte Moderno (CAAM), Las Palmas, Canary Islands, for the exhibition Traversiá, curated by Christian Perazzone and Joëlle Busca Camera: Manuel Perezmilian and Berni Searle Assistant: Flora Barrow Editing: Ronet van der Walt Seeking Refuge prints Photo-credit: Tony Meintjies Assistant: Flora Barrow Day for Night Commissioned by Stavanger/European Capital of Culture 2008 for the project On the Edge, organised by Hå gamle prestegard, Norway Camera and editing: Glen Thomas Sound: Andrew Chicken and Berni Searle A Fine Balance and Room with a View Photo-credit: Hans Edward Hammonds Additional photography and compositing: Tony Meintjes

MICHAEL STEVENSON