Born in 1958 in Surabaya, Indonesia, Grace Ellen Barkey is a choreographer, visual artist and performer. In 1986, together with Jan Lauwers she co-founded the Brussels-based collective Needcompany.With playful-poetic performances and installations, which are supported by musical elements and absurd humour, she eludes the fixed boundaries of the artistic disciplines of theatre, dance, performance and visual arts. Since 1992, Barkey has been building an international career with her productions and is constantly expanding her oeuvre. For her performance "Chunking" (2005), she was nominated for the Flemish Culture Prize. Her current works include "Mush-Room" (2013), "FOREVER" (2016), "PIE – Probabilities of Independent Events" (2019) and "Malam / Night" (2021). For "Malam / Night" Grace Ellen Barkey decolonized her name and uses the name of her grandmother. In her most recent installations, Barkey explores the notion of transposition, the spatial displacement of a structure and invites the viewer to become a part of a sensory work. As the basis for this study she uses her own garden in Brussels, where she has been photographing and filming various plants, flowers as well as leaves for many years.
Grace Ellen Barkey's varied artistic practice has taken her to venues such as Kunstinstituut Melly (former Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art), Rotterdam, PACT Zollverein, Essen, BOZAR Centre for Fine Arts, Brussels, Benaki Museum, Athens, Poortersloge, Bruges, Cultuurcentrum Strombeek, Grimbergen, the International Figure Theatre Festival, Erlangen and the Ruhrtriennale. Together with the visual artist Lot Lemm, Barkey founded the label Lemm&Barkey in 2004.