Crushed
We've decided Joost O. Bosland is our new best friend for sending us information from the Michael Stevenson Gallery in Cape Town. (Actually, we just sorta like saying "Joost.") Anyway, we've heard that Berni Searle will be presenting her third solo exhibition in the gallery starting on 21 September.
In this outing, Searle will be featuring "Night Fall," a three-channel video installation along with a series of related prints. Shot mainly at dusk and dawn, Searle's video is meant to elicit a mood of dreamlike languor as she stands upon and falls down a giant mound of crushed grape skins, creating a reddish purple backdrop that we think simultaneously signifies fruition, decadence, exhaustion, and decay.
Searle was trained as a sculptor and has become over the last decade one of South Africa's most visible artists, both in South Africa and abroad, often dealing with South Africa's history of racial encounter and its legacies of confrontation, amalgamation, and classification. We note that she has paid particular attention to South Africa's peculiar (and now officially defunct) classification of "coloured," meaning of mixed race.
Among other honors, Searle's 2005 Vapour was selected for the Arsenale exhibition Always a Little Further at the 51st Venice Biennale. The show runs through 20 October.
18 September 2006