Commissioned for a solo exhibition in Bruges, Brussels, Interlaced shows Berni SEARLE’s continuing engagement with the effects of colonisation, dispossession and displacement. Filmed in the ornate Gothic Chamber of Bruges’s town hall, the site, as a seat of power, presents a backdrop against which to consider the wealth accumulated in a country with a history marred by plundering and violence under King Leopold II in the Congo.

 

Two new large-scale prints that draw on the performance were produced in early 2021 for an exhibition at the Johannesburg Contemporary Art Foundation. The incorporation of the artist’s own body can be seen in Mantle I (2021), where Searle is covered in a golden cape, and in Mantle II (2021), where the shroud has dropped to her feet, revealing the artist in a black lace gown with gold-painted hands.

 

The transformation of Searle’s body is also evident in an earlier work titled Seeking Refuge (2008), in which the artist’s hands and feet are covered in a deep crimson red. Here she specifically examines the microcosm of Lanzarote, a landscape scarred by volcanic rock and ash, which proves inhospitable but for the hardiest of species. Dying her body using the crimson acid ink of an indigenous insect, the cochinilla, the series shows Searle both independent, striding in the landscape as with Flight (2008) and hiding or laying herself to rest, as with Enfold (2008). Becoming part of the land, she makes visible the feelings of translocation and lost identity that migrants experience as well as the tenacity to survive in an otherwise inhospitable landscape.