Working across performance, installation and film, Berni Searle turns herself into an abstraction to open up a universe of meanings. Her three-channel video installation Interlaced (2011) was shot in Bruges, Belgium. Once nicknamed the “Venice of the North”, the city became a backwater by the 1800s. It was revived as a centre for culture and trade by the infamous Leopold II.
A gold-shrouded shape in the sumptuous city hall is revealed as the artist. She exchanges cloth for a lace veil. A score by South African musician Neo Muyanga is based on the Muslim call to prayer and played on the belfry carillon. Searle’s gold-covered hands are a reminder of Belgium’s brutality in the Congo, where workers who did not meet the colonial admin- istration’s quota for rubber collection had their hands severed.
The panels of the photo installation Sediment (2023) compose an image of the Jagger Reading Room at the University of Cape Town in the aftermath of a fire in 2021, in which an important collection of African film, among other holdings, was destroyed. The work meditates on changing states of matter and how meanings accrete. In the aftermath of the archive is imagination. Searle invites us to find courage to create in the interstices as we mourn the burning of our world.
—Sinazo Chiya
