Martine Barrat

Martine Barrat is a French dancer and actress based in New York City who has become known for her photographs and videos of daily life across a variety of cultures. Barrat was discovered as a dancer at an international dance festival in Edinburgh, Scotland in the 1960s by the American theater director and producer Ellen Stewart. Stewart proceeded to fly Barrat to New York City to work for her theater, the LaMaMa Experimental Theater Club, in 1968. Around this time Barrat began collaborating with the Human Arts Ensemble, a musical collective that included all performers, regardless of race, and together they ran video workshops for the young people of the neighbourhood in which they were based. Throughout the 1970s Barrat took many photographs and made videos about the communities and people of New York, especially the areas of Harlem and the Bronx, garnering significant critical acclaim for her video series, “You Do the Crime, You Do the Time” (1971-76) about two gangs in the South Bronx. Barrat’s more recent photography has included communities in various cultures, including Cuba, Brazil and Japan, but the life of Harlem has remained central to her body of work over time. Barrat screened “The Trial of the Roman Kings” - an excerpt from “You Do the Crime, You Do the Time” - at The Kitchen in 1982 as part of Return/Jump, a video retrospective curated by Tom Bowes. For more information visit: http://www.martinebarrat.com/