“A matter of time”, 2003, Bernie Searle
Courtesy of the Stevenson-gallery Cape Town
Born 1964, lives and works in Cape Town, returns us the gaze and raises questions about attitudes towards race and gender. Initially trained as a sculptor, Searle now often uses her own body as subject in photographs and videos, it is most of all the surface of the skin which fascinate her, as the site of confrontation. Colour me is an installation reaching for the gendered and racialised body. Photographs of a naked female body, immersed in red, yellow and brown; spices, red pepper, tumeric and ginger. How is it that colour is thought to inscribe identity into the body? Apartheid history lingers in the smell and in looking at these photographs.
“I think my work operates on different levels and reflects different racial and political experiences - but I don’t think my pieces are limited by that. I hope they transcend and go beyond that, and provide a space for illusion and fantasy. They reflect a desire to present myself in various ways to counter the image that has been imposed on me.”
In “A Matter of Time”, a poetic and surrealist video installation where a body walks, climbs, on a
sheet of glass, upward, forward, towards the future, only to glide back, with a screeching sound. The movement is repeated, again and again.
