Berni Searle  
Light, as a feather

1 MAY until 20 JUN 2026
Opening – 1 MAY 2026, 6-10 pm

The exhibition Light, as a feather brings together two bodies of work from 2001 and 2025 by Berni Searle (b. 1964, Cape Town), whose multidisciplinary practice spans photography, video, performance, and installation. Searle centers the human body – both figuratively and conceptually, or through its strategic absence – to explore selfrepresentation, collective identity, and narratives shaped by history, memory, and place.

The series Sugar Girls (2025–) 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, now tourist attraction V&A Waterfront, dramatically transformed by the economic exclusion and displacement of local communities. 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 meetings took place in so-called suikerhuisies (“sugar houses”), private homes where women gathered and received sailors. Drawing on interviews and archival fragments, Searle traces how these largely undocumented histories, shaped by segregation and economic precarity, continue to reverberate across generations.

The exhibition furthermore presents the works Falling and Still (#4, 6 & 7), which were created as part of the production of the video Snow White, first presented at the Venice Biennale in 2001. In this work, flour gradually covers and reveals Searle’s body before she gathers the flour and kneads it with water into dough. Her actions recall the making of rotis learned from her mother, connecting her to her cultural heritage through food.

Seen together, these works foreground the body as a site where histories of labour, migration, and cultural exchange surface. The exhibition title evokes the lightness of sugar, flour, and feathers – their translucency and slight weight – yet this material delicacy contrasts with the heavy sociopolitical legacies they carry, drawing on emotions of displacement, vulnerability, shame and loss.