The Fourth Wall (Transparency)
Performance Studies Associate Professor Malik Gaines' Art Collective 'My Barbarian' will perform at The Whitney Museum of American Art as a part of a survey of the group's work, celebrating their twentieth anniversary. Their upcoming performance, Transparency 2021, will take place on Friday, November 5th.
Transparency 2021 is a site-specific performance in which music, a live-feed, text, and disco-inspired dance numbers appear throughout the Whitney’s building in both public areas and private administrative offices, inviting viewers to consider what is visible and hidden within the Museum’s functions. The partially choreographed and partially improvised work permeates the architecture of the Museum, and temporarily blurs the boundaries of institutional spaces and information. The 2009 iteration of the work, The Fourth Wall (Transparency), was performed at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and explored “transparency” as both optical phenomena and metaphor for accountability.
For two decades, the members of My Barbarian—Malik Gaines, Jade Gordon, and Alexandro Segade—have used performance to theatricalize social issues, adapting narratives from modern plays, historical texts, and mass media into structures for their performances. On the occasion of their twentieth anniversary, My Barbarian will present a two-part survey of their work. One part will reimagine iconic shows representative of the trio's array of theatrical styles through a series of live performances. These will be complemented by an exhibition that traces the history of the group's work through video performances, documentary footage, as well as sculptures, paintings, drawings, masks, and puppets drawn from their extensive archive.
This show has been curated by Adrienne Edwards, the Engell Speyer Family Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs for The Whitney and Performance Studies Ph.D. Candidate!