Adele Adendorff

Nomadic Figurations of Identity: in the Work of Berni Searle Adele Adendorff

This study focuses on Berni Searle?s art, in which she searches for alternative figurations of identity. For Searle, identity as a category seems insufficient, as it cannot account for individuals of mixed heritage. Searle?s body of work testifies to an attempt to position and locate herself and marginalised subjects within post-apartheid South Africa. History, tradition, culture, race and gender are pivotal to Searle?s visual examination of her body and her identity, as these inscribe the subject at both symbolic and physical levels. Identity was investigated within South African context and the contexts of various postcolonial, postmodern and feminist debates. Searle?s works were investigated revealing nomadic subjectivity, as philosophised about by Gilles Deleuze and theorised about by Rosi Braidotti. Nomadic subjectivity promotes the notion that identity is fluid and located in the interstitial spaces between dichotomies and various debates. The habitation of such liminal spaces in the interstices between binary oppositions and views relates to what Homi Bhabha has defined as the ?third space? and the notion of hybridity.