With ‘The Garden of Earthly Disquiet’, starting from her own traumatic history and the emotional legacy she inherited, Grace Tjang tells the story of all mothers who have been brutally torn away from their children. It is a reproach to the colonial history underpinning this personal trauma.

Drawing from the inspiration of the performative installation MALAM / NIGHT (2021), Grace Ellen Barkey creates The Garden of Earthly Disquiet, a new dance performance. MALAM / NIGHT began with obsessively filming flowers and plants in her garden during sleepless nights. Over the past years, Barkey was seriously ill and spent a long time in - as she describes herself - the twilight zone between the passing world and the real one. The nights made this wondrous period even more mysterious. In her intense observations of the flowers, she connected with her deceased parents and ancestors. Born in Indonesia, these magical encounters are not strange to her. The stories of her family are sad and violent. Each story hides the whole colonial history and its wounds. She decided to merge the nocturnal video’s with Wayang, the Indonesian shadow play.

For her most recent works, Grace chose to decolonise her name, adopting the name of her grandmother, Tjang, in honour of her grandmother and her family history.