Berni Searle and 'Float' at the SANG
by Kim Gurney
The most striking aspect about Berni Searle's latest video work is, at first glance, the split perspective. Watching the nine-minute Snow White (2001) from the side of a darkened gallery is initially quite a disconcerting experience. One is torn between two large screens on either side of the room. Both project Searle kneeling naked in a bright spotlight; the one is filmed face-on, the other from above. But a desire to connect with the subject soon overrides curiosity of a birds-eye view and the preference of most viewers is to connect with Searle eyeball to eyeball - perhaps an interesting occurrence in itself.
As white pea flour begins to fall onto Searle's head, followed by a steady stream of water, she sits stoic and unflinching. Searle's apparent adversity is soon up-ended as she gathers up the surrounding mess and kneads it into dough.
An immediate engagement with the issue of perspective is not coincidental. At one level, life is purely about perspective. What we choose to believe is true for us. Searle's use of a split screen reminds us of this fact. It also alludes to the shifting nature of reality; as we choose a different lens, so the view changes and perception alters to something new.
This technical peculiarity is integral to the complex issues Searle explores in her work, as illustrated by her second video Home and Away (2003). Filmed in the 16km oceanic divide between Spain and Morocco, Searle is suspended floating on the first screen in the ocean between Europe and Africa. The vision of her body, flotsam on the water, is at once both corpse-like and strangely beautiful. Searle thus evokes the contradiction of a journey: the death of the past coupled with the bright hope of a new future.
The second screen shows the glaring sun in the sky - Searle's prostrate view - and later shifts to look across the ocean towards a range of mountains. Whether we are leaving that landscape or arriving is unclear. Searle's work is regularly open-ended, perhaps to emphasize the fallacy of neatly resolved answers to life's questions. The photographs that complement the video only serve to reinforce this notion, posing as they do as a kind of arrested moment of the past in contradiction to the fluidity of video in the present.
Place - both geographical and psychic - is integral to Searle's work and Home and Away is deliberately filmed in the space of trade and human displacement, the stretch of water where desperate refugees lose their lives. The message is both personal and collective, as emphasized by the interjection of Searle's voice. At first, the words are unclear. But it soon becomes apparent she is conjugating the verbs 'to love', 'to fear' and 'to leave' - 'I love', 'You love', 'We love' - reminiscent of the repetition involved in learning to speak a foreign language.
Searle's work has always engaged with issues of identity, often using her body as a locus of investigation, and her recent work is no exception. Snow White sees Searle's body transformed in colour by the finely milled white grains that conjure up both colonial roots and issues of race. Gender expectations are also strongly evoked through both the subservient kneeling posture and Searle's repetitive kneading, which echoes the actions of generations of women forebears.
Issues around identity are most strikingly communicated in her third video work, A Matter of Time (2003). Searle has shattered conventional perspective once again, this time by filming her careful barefoot walk across a glass plane with the camera positioned underneath. Thus her feet are the main focus, connecting with the slippery surface of spilt olive oil, with the rest of her body distorted above.
Through this performance, Searle effectively communicates the tentative yet decisive forward steps we all must take while navigating potentially treacherous terrain in our lives - both physical and emotional. Searle walks from the bottom of the screen to the top, which shifts left-right conventions, and is occasionally drawn backwards to the start in a faster sequence to disappear off-screen. This play on presence and absence also adds another dimension to the meaning. Once Searle has reached the safety of the other side, her fortunes are reversed and she is suddenly sucked violently and inexplicably back down to where she first began.
February 3 - 29
