Brook Andrew

Brook Andrew is an artist who has exhibited internationally since 1996 and who continues to work with, and exhibit in, major international museums, research centres and galleries. He examines dominant Western narratives, specifically relating to colonialism, placing Australia at the centre of a global inquisition. In doing so, his practice harnesses alternate narratives to assemble new directions of understanding historical legacies of colonialsim and modernist histories. Apart from drawing inspiration from vernacular objects and the archive, he travels internationally to work with communities and various private and public collections.

Creating interdisciplinary works, video, sculpture, photography and immersive installations, Brook Andrew presents viewers with alternative choices for interpreting the world, both individually and collectively, by intervening, expanding and re-framing history and our inheritance. For example, in 2014 he worked closely with the collections of the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Museo de America and Museo Nacional de Antropologia for the exhibition Really Useful Knowledge curated by WHW at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia to create a rigorous immersive installation A Solid Memory of the Forgotten Plains of our Trash and Obsessions reflecting on Spanish, British and Australian history and colonialism.  His recent intallations and artworks in the context of history and the archive is also reflected in the artwork Ancestral Workship in Artist Making Movement, Asian Art Biennial, National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts; and The Island for Artist and Empire at the Tate Britain in 2015/16.

Brook Andrew curated TABOO in 20012/13 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney: a turning point in how indigenous and non-indigenous artists and themes are expressed, pigeonholed and determined through stereotyping in colonised socities.

Most recently, Andrew was awarded a 2017 Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship, Smithsonian Institute USA, and just returned from the musee du quai Branly, Paris, as a Photography Residencies Laureate, investigating and making new work surrounding the relationship between the colonial photographer and the sitter.

His other current research includes an ambitious international comparative three-year Federal Government Australian Research Council grant called Representation, Rememberance and the Memorial, designed to respond to the repeated high-level calls for a national memorial to Aboriginal loss and the frontier wars: www.rr.memorial

In 2016 Brook Andrew, with his collaborator Trent Walter, will complete Australia's first official government supported memorial to the frontier wars, where Tunnerminnerwait and Maulboyheener, the first two Aboriginal men to be hanged in Melbourne, will be installed adjacent to Melbourne Gaol.