Cape Town-based artist Berni Searle presents a Limited Edition signed print titled Candy (glance). The print forms part of her new series, Sugar girls, conceived as part of a broader research project that emerged from her time as the 6th artist-in-residence in Zeitz MOCAA’s Atelier programme from 13 June 2024 to 11 May 2025.
Sugar girls offers the artist’s response to the little known and rarely accessed narratives of local communities that once shared greater historical proximity to the museum’s maritime location – the historical harbour of the V&A Waterfront. Searle’s own connection to the city as well as the shared experiences that often relate to its contested sites, have often been central to her practice.
The series, Sugar girls, maintains the artist’s quiet process of image-making, both seen and unseen.
Artwork Details: Berni Searle, Candy (glance), 2025, archival pigment ink on Baryta Photo Rag paper. Image size: 60 x 60 cm with paper size: 70 x 70cm, unframed. Edition of 20. Photography by Tony Meintjies.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Berni Searle is an artist working across the mediums of photography, video, performance, and installation. Born in Cape Town, South Africa, in 1964, Searle’s personal experiences growing up against the backdrop of an apartheid state have deeply influenced her work and artistic expression. While Searle’s works are often explored in dialogue with this socio-political legacy, in relation to current-day realities, her use of metaphor and poetic ambiguity transcends the specificity of context, drawing on universal human emotions associated with displacement, vulnerability, and loss.
Using her body as ground, the skin as surface, and processes of concealment and revealing, Searle centres the human body, figuratively and at times conceptually, through the absence of the body, to explore questions of the human condition and experience. Her practice, which is largely performative, brings into focus issues of self-representation, the relationship between personal and collective identity, and narratives connected to history, memory, and place.
WHAT: Berni Searle, Candy (glance), 2025
WHERE: Zeitz MOCAA, Silo District, V&A Waterfront, Cape Town 8001
INFO: VISIT | See also Berni Searle – sixth Zeitz MOCAA Atelier artist-in-residence |
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