Berni Searle: Light, as a Feather

The exhibition _Light, as a feather_ by Berni Searle (b. 1964, Cape Town), brings together two bodies of work from the early ‘Colour Me’ series (1999-2001) and a more recently produced series called ‘Sugar girls’ (2025-). Searle’s multidisciplinary practice spans photography, video, performance, and installation, which often centres the human body – both figuratively and conceptually, or through its strategic absence – to explore self- representation, collective identity, and narratives shaped by history, memory, and place. The ‘Sugar girls’ series (2025–) is an ongoing project which draws on Cape Town’s history as a port city at the crossroads of the Atlantic and Indian Oceans. Conceived during Searle’s 2024 residency at Zeitz MOCAA, the project engages the ‘docks’ area, which has become a major tourist attraction called the V&A Waterfront. As with many waterfront development projects, this area has transformed dramatically in a relatively short period due to interconnected processes of gentrification and various economic and political factors, leading to the displacement of many local communities that once frequented it. The work focuses on women who, from the 1960s onward, formed relationships with sailors docking in the harbour ranging from transactional exchanges to longer-term attachments, sometimes resulting in children. Many of these exchanges took place in private homes, which were often referred to as _suikerhuisies_ (sugar houses), where women gathered and received the sailors. Drawing on interviews, archival fragments, and anecdotal references, Searle traces how these largely undocumented histories, shaped by segregation and economic precarity, continue to reverberate across generations. The exhibition furthermore presents a selection of works from the early ‘Colour me’ series, including _Still #4, 6 & 7_, which were created at the same time and are related to the production of the video _Snow White_, first presented at the Venice Biennale in 2001. In this work, flour gradually transforms, covers, and reveals Searle’s body before she gathers and kneads it with water, forming it into a dough. Her actions recall the making of rotis learned from her mother, connecting her to her cultural heritage through food. The exhibition also includes an installation from this early body of work, called _Off white: back to back_ (1999), which has only been shown previously at Inova, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee as part of Searle’s first residency and exhibition in the USA. The presentation of the series is completed by a collection of polaroids. Initially used as a means to test exposure and the artist’s position during the staging of the photographs that make up the ‘Colour me’ series, the polaroids have become a work in their own right. By engaging with notions of transience, and by quite literally speaking of – and through – light and colour, they embody the connection between the two series’ that come together in ‘_Light, as a feather_’. Seen together, these works provide an opportunity to consider the continuities and divergences that shape Searle’s practice, which continues to foreground the body as a site where histories of labour, migration, and cultural exchange surface. The exhibition title evokes the lightness of flour and sugar in their material translucency and slight weight, as well as the colour of the materials that have been used in relation to the body. This delicacy contrasts with the underlying weight of the sociopolitical legacies they carry, drawing on emotions of displacement, vulnerability, shame, and loss.