Featured: My Barbarian (Los Angeles, USA)

My Barbarian is a Los Angeles-based performance collective founded in 2000 by Malik Gaines, Jade Gordon and Alexandro Segade. The trio performs in site-specific plays, musical concerts, theatrical situations and produces video installations that play with the spectacular while engaging viewers critically. Their interdisciplinary projects explore and exhume cross-cultural mishaps and misadventures drawn from history, mythology, art and popular culture.

Photo collage: Alexandro Segade

My Barbarian has performed and exhibited widely in Los Angeles: LACMA, REDCAT, Hammer Museum, MOCA, LAXART, Schindler House, LACE; in New York: Whitney Museum, New Museum, Studio Museum in Harlem, Participant, Inc., Joe’s Pub; and elsewhere at Yerba Buena Center, San Francisco; Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago; Aspen Art Museum; Contemporary Arts Forum, Santa Barbara; Vox Populi, Philadelphia; Samson Projects, Boston; The Power Plant, Toronto; De Appel, Amsterdam; Peres Projects, Berlin; Torpedo, Oslo; El Matadero, Madrid and Galleria Civica, Trento, Italy; Lui Velazquez, Tijuana. My Barbarian was included in the 2005 and 2007 Performa Biennials, the 2006 and 2008 California Biennials and the 2007 Montreal Biennial. In 2008, the group performed commissioned works for the New Museum and Galleria Civica, Trento. They also presented an durational performance installation at Art Positions, Art Basel Miami Beach. In 2008, My Barbarian recieved an Art Matters grant to make a new performance and video project at the Townhouse Gallery, in Cairo, Egypt. They will have their first solo exhibition at a commercial gallery in May 2009, at Steve Turner Contemporary, Los Angeles.

Performances:

POLAAT
DANCE WITCHES DANCE
HYSTERA THEATER
THE CASE OF THE STAIRS
NON-WESTERN
VOYAGE OF THE WHITE WIDOW
MOUNTAIN PEOPLES
GERMAN TOOTHBRÜSH / MYTHOLOGIC MASS
SILVER MINDS
YOU WERE BORN POOR & POOR YOU WILL DIE
GODS OF CANADA
PAGAN RIGHTS
MEDIEVAL MORALITY
MB: THE MARY BLAIR STORY
CLOVEN SOFT-SHOE
SQUIRREL RADIO ACTION