Golden Egg is a performance that took place over five hours outside Musée D’art contemporain, MTL, Canada, where Barry laboriously pushed a golden egg with her face across the museum’s plaza while crawling on her hands and knees. Surprisingly the raw egg covered in gold-leaf did not break very easily. Barry had told the curator, Adri Disman, that once the egg broke it would signal the end of the performance. After 4-hours Barry became more aggressive with the egg and eventually it broke when push against a cement block.
View an excerpt from the performance at this link: Golden Egg
The performance calls forth issues of manual labour, class difference and commodity production. During the performance Barry took several short breaks to talk with the public having excellent conversations about the role of artists in the chain of labour within the Canadian gallery and museum systems.
Golden Egg was first self-produced at the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO), Toronto, ON, in 2013. In 2025, the performance was curated by Adriana Disman and the LINK & PIN Performance Art series, as a site-specific, durational performance for the feminist gallery space, RATS-9, in Montreal, QC, Canada.
Photos and video by Adri Disman