Two powerful photographs by South African artist Berni Searle were acquired for Manchester Art Gallery through the Valeria Napoleone XX Contemporary Art Society (VN XX CAS) award, which supports the acquisition of significant works by a living female artist for a museum collection.
Searle works with lens-based media to stage narratives connected to history, memory and place. Using her own body, she addresses racism, the commodification of the female body and its power in myth making. Her work connects to universal emotions of vulnerability, loss and beauty.
Untitled (Red) (1998) is a play on the racial classification of ‘coloured’ used under apartheid, the government’s term for mixed ethnicities. Searle covered herself in spices in reference to the Dutch East India Company’s trade. This brought white colonisers into contact with local inhabitants and slaves of the Cape of Good Hope, who consequently had children of multiple cultural heritage. Searle states: ‘I chose to cover myself with various colours – red, yellow, white, brown – in an attempt to resist any definition of identity which is static, or can be placed into neat categories. Placing myself or my body in the work exposes other aspects of my identity, for example, gender.’ In this work Searle’s mouth is covered and, unable to speak; she confronts us directly with her eyes.
Manchester Art Gallery’s collection has relatively few works by women artists but many depicting women, especially nude women, created by male artists for male patrons. Through using her own body in her work, Searle regains control of female representation. Although her work comes out of the context of South African histories and politics, it raises universal questions that transcend place and speak to works in the Gallery’s collection, its histories and the people of Manchester.
