/ 24 November 2006

Sugar and spice

Berni Searle steers clear of the effects-driven, cut-and-paste razzle-dazzle of much new video art by showing projections of quiet meditation and power. Composed of groups of single takes, three video works — spanning the past seven years — shape the core of Approach, her mid-career retrospective at the Johannesburg Art Gallery. On either side of the films, like punctuation marks, are photographic series based on the moving images. Curator Clive Kellner positioned these works like this to demonstrate Searle’s persistent interests, her changes over time and her increasing significance.

The first room presents her earlier work as foundation concerns: the violence inherent in identity and race. For me, the most commanding are four photographic images from the 1998 Colour Me series. Flour and spices have settled on the artist’s face and she is virtually buried in the seductive dirt of these products of colonisation, slavery and trade. She explores this by embossing and staining her body. It is this first room that underlines the task Searle has set for herself: to use her body as a marker of an imposed identity.

In addition to serving as a historical reminder, these photographs set the stage for the subsequent video. Snow White, produced in 2001. A two-channel projection shows views of the artist’s naked body, kneeling subserviently and gradually covered by a shower of baking flour. When her dark body glows white, water starts dripping from above, providing liquid to knead the dough.

Commissioned for the 49th Venice Biennale exhibition called Authentic/Ex-centric: Africa In and Out of Africa, the title Snow White is ambiguous. It refers equally to the brand of flour and race politics. Art historian Amelia Jones explains it as “the eponymous fairy tale, which is essentially an allegory of recognition triumphing over disavowment — the movement from object to subject, from being passive to being active, and about claiming agency and self-definition”.

A set of photographs, based on the film Home and Away, follows. Here the artist, in a dress of swirling fabric, floats in the ocean between Morocco and Spain, possibly referring to the origins of her mixed race. The work also refers to the crossings of migrant workers. Gradually, the dress and the artist’s body become obscured by black ink, an image, Kellner writes in the accompanying catalogue, that suggests dislocation and displacement.

It is in the second video work where the true mastery of Searle’s visual language comes to the fore and where her command of the medium is confirmed by her choice of the virtually single, unedited take. About to Forget (2005), installed as a three-channel projection, shows Searle’s family photographs rendered as red crépe-paper cut-outs. Submerged in a bath of warm water the colour bleeds, the flow of the liquid medium leaving the portraits devoid of colour, defined only by faint outlines.

Gabeba Baderoon, winner of the DaimlerChrysler Award for South African Poetry in 2005, writes that the film’s shift “from presence to invisibility touches on our deepest sense of self. Despite our desires, the flow and tug of the mind bring fainter and fainter recollections … notions of family and identity at the core of our selves, what is retrievable and lasting?”

The third and most recent of the video works on show is Nightfall. Produced in 2006, the work is a shift from Searle’s earlier preoccupations, writes Kellner, “with identity, family and exile to explore a more surreal landscape equally imbued with notions of loss.” The viewer is almost surrounded by the artist’s experience on a mound of grapeskins discarded after the process of making wine. Filmed on a wine farm in Stellenbosch, the hard skins rain on the artist, again as if in burial.

Throughout the show, the viewer is aware of Searle’s tightly crafted visual language. She has a “thing for food”, she notes in an interview, which is “one of the tentative connections to my heritage”. The use of her body, in her art, “is the most immediate thing that I have to work with” and becomes a proxy for many other bodies.

The installation by Simon Gush, Sam Ntentji and William Mabidilala breathes life into Kellner’s curation. It is this technical finesse that allows the viewer to walk from darkened to lit environments, to experience the force of the moving image with periods of stillness between. Together, the artwork, its curation and installation highlight the artist’s ability to convey a complex political and emotional field with a succinct language, clean, directed and to the point.

Approach is on at the Johannesburg Art Gallery until February 28