METZ.- Berni Searle works with lens-based media—photography, video, and film —to stage narratives connected to history, memory, and place. While her work is intertwined with South African history that has emerged from a “life apart” (apartheid), her poetic and abstract imagery transcends the specific to address ideas about belonging and displacement in various contexts. The exhibition is on view from May 20th until September 18th, 2011 at Frac Lorraine, Metz, France. She questions tirelessly the self and the other, examining the elements of her own identity shaped by successive cross-fertilizations: a “composite identity” based on “creolization”―a notion dear to Edouard Glissant’s heart. Begun in the early 1990s, Searle’s work (installations, videos, and photographs) is poetically political. Nourished by personal mythologies, it questions memories and memory (About to
