Berni Searle's: Soliloquies on Strength and Solitude

o f earlier works appear, including a multiscreen sculptural presentation, this time in a U-shape configuration that envelops the viewer; the insertion o f Searle's body in a state o f physical duress, or vulnerability; allusions to texture and scent; and the use o f organic products—all in a seminarrative format. The audio track, however, represents a significant point of departure. For Night Fall, Searle invited Zolani Mahola, lead singer from one o f South Africa's most popular bands, Freshlyground, to collaborate on the soundtrack through an open brief. Leaving her band's European tour briefly to join Searle in Rome, Mahola went into a studio to record vocal responses to projections o f Night Fall. Mahola's background in drama coupled with her soulful and eclectic interpretation o f Searle's imagery brings a melancholic energy and somewhat hypnotic aura to the piece. Searle edited Mahola's tracks into an audio arrangement that brings visitors into the privacy and playfulness o f her dreamscape dialogue. Searle has used her own voice to create ambient vocals in her earlier work Home and Away (2003); however, Mahola's emotive vocal responses to Night Fall open up a new creative sphere for both artists. Moreover, the texture o f Mahola's vocal incantations and sensual rumblings accentuates that the core voice o f this work is intimate and feminine. The film opens with a central projection o f Searle lying prostrate on a mound o f grape skins in a dark setting. Her body is being smothered by grape skins falling in slow motion. The ambiguity of Searle's pose as a fallen heroine or a sleeping figure provides a static focal point for reflection as activity begins to unfold on the two flanking panels . Mahola's audio for this screen enhances this ambiguity and can be interpreted as the voice o f Searle's subconscious during a dream. Searle's insertion o f her body as the central image and the subsequent covering of her body with grape skins visually reference earlier works where she modified the legibility o f her physical appearance with spices in the Colour Me series (1998), black Egyptian henna in Lifeline (1999) and Stain (1999-2000) from the Discoloured series, flour in Snow White (2001), and olive oi,l in A Matter of Time (2003). Searle's use o f organic matter to mask her body functions is a method to complicate notions o f identity by blending elements o f fantasy with reality . The art historian Liese van der Watt writes that Searle "literalizes the radical insufficiency of identity by devising a practice that visualizes simultaneous presence and absence, visibility and invisibility , as if she is never quite anywhere.'"2 The right-hand screen opens with a piercing blue sky. This pristine image begins to change as grape skins cascade into view from the top of the screen. Searle's performance on the mound of skins evokes the practice o f stomping on the grapes and emphasizes the sensuous quality and physical engagement of this process. Searle appears in the center of the screen wearing a white sleeveless All images: Night Fall (stills). Three-channel video projection, DVD format, shot on S16mm film. Color, sound. 5min 52sec. Courtesy the artist and Michael Stevenson. 152* N k a Journal of Contemporary African Art dress, with her arms raised and her body turning in a circle. Her pose is simultaneously vulnerable and victorious. Grape skins continue to fall upon her and slowly begin to stain her pristine dress. The image of Searle precariously perched at the apex of this mountain bears formal and conceptual links to Penny Siopis's Patience on a Monument: A History Painting (1988). Siopis's appropriation of photocopied images depicting "a global visual culture of enslavement"3 is conceptually alluded to in Night Fall by the mountain of grape skins, which could evoke the exploitation of laborers on the wine farms in the years of apartheid.4 In Night Fall, a blue sky with cascading grapes serves as a pause or segue. Searle then reappears climbing up the side of the mountain. Perhaps her triumphant ascension to the top...