Artist, choreographer and performer Grace Ellen Barkey was born in Surabaya (Indonesia). Barkey lives and works in Brussels, and is co-founder of the artists’ company Needcompany (1986). Her work sits on the borderline between theatre, dance, performance and visual art. Frank Zappa's motto was ‘to me, absurdity is the only reality’, and this is also a common thread in Barkey's absurd, performative work.
Grace Ellen Barkey’s performances are characterised by an excess of, or lack of, something. She always creates a world filled with strange, sensual, absurd figures. Clownlike and grotesque exaggerations that lie somewhere between animal and human, amorphous and monstrous; and that always balance on a fragile paradox where melancholy, harmony, humour and hope inexplicably take shape.
As a performer, Grace Ellen Barkey appears in the work of Jan Lauwers, where she provides commentary on the contents of his performances as an Indian princess, among others, for example in Caligula (1998), No Comment (2001), and The blind poet (2015).
Grace Ellen Barkey is also steadily building on her visual oeuvre. Her most recent installations attest to a stillness. An internalisation. “The unspoken, that which is not revealed, is expressed in the absurd but also in the mystical”, says Grace Ellen Barkey. Both the delirious imagination and the stillness are attempts to express the unspeakable. In these installations, the spectator’s senses are not overloaded and overstimulated with absurd, grotesque and surreal images, whose interconnection cannot be grasped at a purely rational level. The starting point of her installations is Grace Ellen Barkey’s personal relationship with nature and its transience. In 2021 she decolonised her name and used the name of her grandmother, Grace Tjang. In this way she allows a different history to vibrate through her identity as an artist.
Her visual work has recently been exhibited at Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art (Rotterdam), Poortersloge (Bruges), CC Strombeek, UZ Jette and Coup de Ville (Sint-Niklaas), M HKA (Antwerp), mumok (Vienna), Berliner Festspiele (Berlin), EcoC24 (Salzkammergut),…
Grace Ellen Barkey, together with Lot Lemm, was part of the artist duo Lemm&Barkey. Their work was exhibited at BOZAR (Brussels), Benaki museum (Athens), Musée des Arts décoratifs (Paris), CC Strombeek, Dr. Guislain museum (Ghent), and Triënnale Hasselt / Superbodies, among others.
Overview of productions
