Berni Searle (b. 1964) is a Cape Town-based South African artist working across photography, video, film and installation. Her practice has established her as one of the most internationally recognised figures in contemporary South African art. Born to parents of African and German-English ancestry, she grew up during apartheid classified as Coloured, a label she later refused and has continuously examined through her art. She trained at the Michaelis School of Fine Art at the University of Cape Town, completing her Bachelor of Arts in Fine Art between 1984 and 1987 and her Master of Fine Art between 1992 and 1995. She initially worked as a sculptor before developing her lens-based practice.
Searle's work centres on the body, most often her own, as a site where histories of race, classification, colonial trade and gendered violence are made newly visible. Her landmark series Colour Me (1998–2000) depicts the artist lying down, her skin covered in coloured spices including turmeric, paprika and ground cloves, invoking the spice trade that drew colonial ships to the Cape and the interracial histories that followed. Subsequent bodies of work, including A Darker Shade of Light (1999), About to Forget (2005) and the Black Smoke Rising trilogy (2009–2010) extended this approach into investigations of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, intergenerational memory and the aftermath of political violence, while deploying material, gesture and the performing body with formal precision and emotional restraint.
Searle's work was included in the 1997 Johannesburg Biennale, the 1998 Cairo Biennale, where she received the UNESCO/AICA Award, and the Venice Biennale in both 2001 and 2005. She received the Minister of Culture Prize at Dak'Art in 2000, the Standard Bank Young Artist Award for Visual Art in 2003, and the Mbokodo Award in the Visual Arts category in 2015; she was also shortlisted for the inaugural Artes Mundi Award in 2004 and held a Rockefeller Bellagio Creative Arts Fellowship in 2014. Her work has been shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art in Washington DC and the Brooklyn Museum, among many other international venues. She is currently Associate Professor at Michaelis. Her work is held in the South African National Gallery, the Johannesburg Art Gallery, the Museum of Modern Art and major private and institutional collections internationally.
