Berni Searle

Snow White, 2001

The cynical apartheid regime left South Africa with a trauma that cannot be avoided as a context from works by South African Artists. Berni Searle takes up the perfidious process of discriminatory classification by making her own body available. Her video Snow White, which works as a double projection, shows the artist shot from two different angles – head-on and vertically from above. Water and flour are trickling down on to her naked body, mingling on her skin to form a pale layer that masks the body but does not paralyze it. Then Searle starts to knead the flour and water into dough. In the frontal depiction the action takes place with an archaic looking sense of sculptural physicality, while the projection that shows her centrally from above gives her gestures a painterly two-dimensional quality. In an individual search for what identity can be beyond categorical attributions, Berni Searle’s body provides the factual element to invent herself again: “Problems crop up because in many cases my identity has been made for me” (B. S., 2001).