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 lies on the border between theatre, dance, performance and visual art. “To me, absurdity is the only reality” was Frank Zappa’s motto, and it is also the common ground running through Barkey’s absurd, performative work.
What characterizes Grace Ellen Barkey's performances is an excess or a loss. She continually creates a world full of strange, voluptuous, absurd figures. Clownish and grotesque enlargements, somewhere between animal and human, between amorphous and monstrous, always balancing on a fragile paradox where melancholy harmony, humor and hope take shape in an elusive way.
As a performer, Grace Ellen Barkey can be seen in the work of Jan Lauwers, where she, among other things, comments as an Indonesian princess on the content of his performances, such as in Caligula (1998), No Comment (2001), The Blind Poet (2015), and others.
She steadily adds to her visual oeuvre. Her most recent installations relay a stillness. An internalisation. “Things left unsaid, things not revealed, are expressed in the absurd but also in the mystic”, says Grace Ellen Barkey. Both the frantic imagination and the stillness are attempts to express the unspeakable. In these installations, the spectator’s senses are not overfed and overstimulated with absurd, grotesque and surreal images between which the connection is unclear with rationale alone. The starting point of her installations is Grace Ellen Barkey’s personal connection with nature and its impermanence. In 2021, she decolonised her name and adopted the name of her grandmother, Grace Tjang. In doing so, she allows another history to resonate in her own identity as an artist.
Her visual work has recently been exhibited among others: 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 was one half of the artistic duo Lemm&Barkey, together with Lot Lemm. Their work has been exhibited at several museums including BOZAR (Brussels), Benaki Museum (Athens), Musée des Arts décoratifs (Paris), CC Strombeek, Dr. Guislain museum (Gent), Triënnale Hasselt / Superbodies, and others.
Photo: Phile Deprez
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Dance