By staining different parts of her body with Egyptian henna, Berni Searle highlights notions of ‘black-ness’. She toys with the relationship between light and dark, where “worth has traditionally been measured by the lightness of one’s skin”. It’s a reversal of the constructed desirability of ‘whiteness’. In ‘Stain’, from Searle’s Discoloured series, the inclusion of a dictionary definition of the word ‘stain’ reiterates the effect of being ‘discoloured’. As parts of this dictionary definition suggests, a stain is a spot or mark that is not easily removed. It is not easy to escape the colour of your skin. For many migrants who visit South Africa from other parts of the continent, skin colour is an important marker of difference. Migrants are often targeted for having a skin colour that is too dark. And in another expression of the ‘staining’ of outsiders, non-nationals are identified by their vaccination marks that are different from the vaccination marks borne by South Africans.

© Rory Bester, "Floating Free" in Berni Searle, Berni Searle: Float (Bell-Roberts, 2003)