yaala /now
select commissions, announcements and group exhibitions
Group exhibition
Still from SMASH IT, 2018, by Brook Andrew
I Still Dream of Lost Biographies
Autograph, London, United Kingdom
9 Oct 2025 – 21 Mar 2026 (closed 21 December - 6 January)
A major group exhibition that reimagines contested narratives through the idea of collage curated by Bindi Vora. Artists: Arpita Akhanda, Brook Andrew, Jess Atieno, Wendimagegn Belete, Sim Chi Yin, Sunil Gupta, Kudzanai Violet Hwami, Henna Nadeem, Sheida Soleimani, Sabrina Tirvengadum, Thato Toeba, and Qualeasha Wood.
This exhibition features Brook’s 2018 video work SMASH IT and the sculpture Sunset III, 2016.
Solo exhibition
Death of a Memorial
Passage, Sydney, Australia
2 October - 7 November, 2025
This solo exhibition included a new wall drawing commissioned by Passage Gallery and the final presentation of Brook Andrew’s Jumping Castle War Memorial, an inflatable sculpture that was first exhibited in the 2010 Biennale of Sydney.
For this closing iteration, the Jumping Castle War Memorial was installed in a funeral style mourning enclosure where the gallery acts as a glass viewing room for the artwork's death. At the close of the exhibition, the artwork was destroyed and recycled.
Alongside the exhibition, Nathan mudyi Sentance led the Death of a Memorial: Critical Forum, bringing together leading First Nations poets, curators, artists, and academics for a day of conversations, poetry, and making to explore truth, memory, and resistance.
Group exhibition
Exhibition view of Resonant: Bodies, Songs and Strings featuring bunyiyanha by Brook Andrew. Photo credit: Frédéric Poletti.
bunyiyanha @ Resonant: Bodies, Songs, and Strings
Musée d’Art et de Culture Soufis MTO, Chatou, France
7 June 2025 - 4 January 2026
Resonant: Bodies, Songs, and Strings co-curated by Elena Sorokina and Simona Dvorak is an immersive project that explores how knowledge circulates through sound, vibration, and listening. Conceived as both a sensory and introspective experience, the exhibition brings together contemporary artworks in conversation with a selection of Sufi pieces from the museum’s permanent collection.
The exhibition features new commissions by artists Rada Akbar, Brook Andrew, Meris Angioletti, Paula Valero Comín, JJJJJerome Ellis, Marie-Claire Messouma Manlanbien, and Sara Ouhaddou, with additional works by Nevin Aladağ, Katy’taya Catitu Tayassu, Célia Gondol, Yoshimi Futamura, Guadalupe Maravilla, Vesna Petresin and Charwei Tsai.
Brook has presented a new wall drawing and selection of two kashkūl vessels from the museum’s collection titled bunyiyanha.
“bunyiyanha is a Wiradjrui word meaning to vibrate or vibration. Wiradjuri is the Aboriginal lands in New South Wales, Australia, and my matrilineal language group. The wall drawing is inspired by our traditions of mark making and wood carving. The black and white pattern generates optical effects to create vibrational energy. I want to connect the purpose of the kashkul, in Sufi culture to hold water, food, and spiritual knowledge, with a Wiradjuri understanding of how we hold culture and continue culture. This work reflects on the responsibilities of being in this world, looking after land, responsibilities to spirituality, and to each other.” Brook Andrew
Solo exhibition
The Visitor and the Resident (Namila Benson) by Brook Andrew
The Visitor and the Resident
musee du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac, Paris, France
2 July - 6 October 2025
The Boîte arts graphiques at the musee du quai Branly recently exhibited Brook’s 2016 photographic series, The Visitor and the Resident. As a recipient of the museum’s Photography Prize in 2015, Brook created this series after deep research into the museum’s photographic collections from the colonial era. This work considers the complexity of the relationship between the ‘visitor’ — a European photographer — and the ‘native’ model and the enduring legacy of this visual archive in our contemporary world.
Read more about the series in an essay by Barbara Glowczewski and Arnaud Morvan.
Group exhibition
Brook Andrew, Vox: Beyond Tasmania, 2013, wood, cardboard, paper, books, color slides, glass slides, 8-mm film, glass, stone, plastic, bone, gelatin silver prints, metal, feather. Exhibition view, 65,000 years: A Short History of Australian Art, Potter Museum of Art, 30 May-25 November 2025. Photo: Christian Capurro.
65,000 years: A Short History of Australian Art
Potter Museum of Art, Melbourne, Australia
30 May - 25 November 2025
Curated by Professor Marcia Langton AO, Judith Ryan AM and Shanysa McConville 65,000 Years: A Short History of Australian Art celebrated the brilliance of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander art while confronting the dark heart of Australia’s colonial history and proclaims the importance of Indigenous knowledge and agency. The exhibition featured more than 400 works, including rarely-seen artworks and cultural objects from the University of Melbourne’s collections, 194 important loans from 78 private and public lenders and six new commissions.
Artworks by Brook were presented, including: Vox: Beyond Tasmania, 2013; The Island I, 2008; The Island IV, 2008 and Sexy & Dangerous, 1996.
Public art commission
Artist impression of giwang dinawan yiray (moon-emu-sun) by Brook Andrew.
giwang dinawan yiray (moon-emu-sun) for Atlassian Central
Sydney Central, Australia, on the lands of Gadigal people of Eora Nation
Opening 2026
"It’s such an interesting building, I was inspired to look up… The whole idea of the artwork is to encourage people to view the world differently and connect with nature, rather than keep to a city-centric view. Otherwise, we are just surrounded by concrete.”
Brook Andrew was selected from a shortlist of notable First Nations artists to create a new public artwork for Atlassian Central, a major development adjacent to Sydney Central train station. Korean American artist, Soo Sunny Park was also commissioned to create new public artwork for the site.
Brook’s proposal is inspired by constellations of the dinawan (emu) which appear across southern skies and inform Indigenous knowledge of seasons and way-finding. Together with representations of giwang (moon) and yiray (sun), the LED artwork will indicate the time of day, current temperature, seasonal changes and the waxing and waning of the moon.
Atlassian Central will be the world’s tallest hybrid timber and steel building constructed adjacent to Sydney’s Central Station and over the existing heritage listed Parcel Shed and former YHA. It will be the home of Tech Central and the headquarters of Atlassian, a leading software company.
Read more about the building and art program here: https://www.smh.com.au/culture/art-and-design/atlassian-central-s-bold-new-art-plugs-into-the-milky-way-and-sydney-s-weather-20240304-p5f9jd.html
Group exhibition
Brook Andrew, ngayy ngajuu dhugul birra (to see my skin broken), 2022. Exhibition view Galerie Nathalie Obadia.
How Not To Be Seen @ Remai Modern
Saskatoon, Canada, on Treaty 6 Territory and the Traditional Homeland of the Métis
10 May to 8 September, 2024
A selection of works from Brook’s 2022 solo exhibition ngayy ngajuu dhugul birra (to see my skin broken), first exhibited at Galerie Nathalie Obadia Paris, are included in How Not To Be Seen.
Visibility in the digital age has become a focal point of investigation. So has its opposite: invisibility. Artists from systematically minoritized and marginalized groups have been at the forefront of modes of thinking and artmaking that explore the latter. How Not to Be Seen features works by a roster of artists from Canada and abroad, including Brook Andrew, Zach Blas, Sandra Brewster, Ruth Buchanan, Charles Campbell, Nick Cave, Ruth Cuthand, David Garneau, Sondra Perry, Amalia Pica, Hito Steyerl, and Haegue Yang.
These artists employ strategies either to abstract the self or to use opacity and withdrawal as forms of resistance to these networks of exploitation. From various perspectives and with a range of approaches, these artists all interrupt the expectation that art makes things visible for everyone to see, creating instead new spaces of shelter, protection, and community.
Solo exhibition
Brook Andrew, Loop, a model of how the world operates, 2008. Exhibition opening, MCA New Acquisitions Launch.
Artist in Focus @ MCA
Sydney, Australia, on the lands of Gadigal people of Eora Nation
opening 24 May 2024
“I like the idea of being hypnotised by a pattern, a pattern that can break the program of how we are supposed to behave and what we are supposed to be doing… For me, the pattern represents a matrix. It’s covering the surface and coding this structure and the people who experience it. It can take you somewhere else and I hope that’s what it does.”
Brook’s expansive wall drawing and neon artwork Loop, a model of how the world operates was acquired by the Museum of Contemporary Art in 2008. Brook has been working with Rebecca Ray, Curator, of Aboriginal & Torres Strait Islander Collection & Exhibitions, for a new iteration of the work opening in May 2024.
Re-created each time it is shown, Loop, a model of how the world operates expands and contracts in response to the dimensions of its environment. What persists is the tension between traditional and contemporary influences, inviting a reflection on the cultural conditions and norms that shape our understanding of the world.
Group exhibition
Detail from Brook Andrew, Systems of Substance, 2016. ACCA Editions.
Worlding @ Platform Arts
60 Little Malop Street, Djillong/Geelong, Wadawurrung Country
June 8 - July 19, 2024
Worlding is an exhibition that explores a mobile and ongoing understanding of how artists partake in the building, designing, and organizing of a personal world through their art practice. This exhibition highlights how artists un/build worlds and re/imagine otherwise in the world as-it-is. They are concerned with alternate realities, memory fields, truth-telling, and possible material-semiotic worlds, and are speculative, critical, idiosyncratic, autoethnographic, co-authored, and ‘Post–’ in nature. These include Brook Andrew, Batia Suter, Madison Bycroft, Patrick Pound, Julie Davies, Kieren Seymour, Daniel Crooks, Si Yi Shen, and Tarryn Love along with her mother Lisa Couzens, and Aunty Dr. Vicki Couzens. And the estates of Stano Filko, Alex Rizkalla, and Katthy Cavaliere through the AGNSW Artist Archives.
Group exhibition
Brook Andrew, The Island II, 2008. Exhibition view, How we remember tomorrow, UQ Art Museum, 2024. Photo: Joe Ruckli.
How we remember tomorrow @ UQ Art Museum
Meanjin/Brisbane, Australia
13 February - 15 June 2024
How we remember tomorrow celebrates storytelling across generations, through oceans and waterways and transcending eras and perspectives. Featured artists understand the watery spaces of our planet as ancestral archives: sources of knowledge that carry stories and cultural practices. Alongside their kin, they honour intergenerational narratives that are disseminated along ocean currents despite ongoing colonial legacies of forced displacement, homeland dispossession, indenture and the loss or dormancy of vital cultural practices.
A group exhibition including artworks by Cora-Allan, Brook Andrew, Atong Atem, Sonja Carmichael and Elisa Jane Carmichael, Stephanie Comilang and Simon Speiser, Latent Community, Shivanjani Lal, Napolean Oui, Lisa Reihana, Teho Ropeyarn, Katerina Teaiwa, Jasmine Togo-Brisby.
Curators: Isabella Baker, Léuli Eshrāghi, Jocelyn Flynn, Peta Rake.
Group exhibition
Brook Andrew, mulunma wiling mangi gudhi II (inside the lip of a stolen song II), 2024. Exhibition view No Feeling is Final. the Skopje Solidarity Collection, National Gallery Prague. Photo by Adéla Kremplová.
No Feeling is Final: The Skopje Solidarity Collection @ National Gallery Prague
National Gallery Prague
22 March - 30 September 2024
First shown at the Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, in 2023, the international group exhibition No Feeling Is Final. The Skopje Solidarity Collection revolves around the Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA) Skopje’s unusual collection of modern works, as well as the historical and political context of this extraordinary project. After the massive earthquake that hit Skopje in 1963, there was a huge effort to help rebuild the devastated city, as a large-scale gesture of international solidarity.
Four contemporary artists and two artist duos – Jesper Alvaer and Isabela Grosseová (Prague and Kvænangen), Brook Andrew (Medellín and Melbourne), Yane Calovski and Hristina lvanoska (Skopje and Berlin), Siniša Ilić (Belgrade), Iman lssa (Vienna and Berlin), and Gülsün Karamustafa (Istanbul and Berlin) – were invited to pick works from MoCA Skopje’s collection that resonate with their respective artistic practices. The exhibition offers a new perspective of the history of post-war modern art through this unique collection.
Brook is showing a new iteration of his installation work in Prague that combines immersive wall drawing, inflatable elements and eight artworks from the MoCA Skopje Collection. The work presents a new way of looking at the canon of Western art, and the particular moment of European high modernism which was dominated by white male artists. Brook complicates this moment drawing attention to the struggle within the Solidarity Collection between the former Yugoslavian artists and the Euro-American artists as well as the influence and appropriation of non-western art works and designs.
Curated by What, How & for Whom / WHW (Ivet Ćurlin, Nataša Ilić, and Sabina Sabolović) and Rado Ištok
Group exhibition
Brook Andrew, detail from LOVE & KINDNESS (Mandarin & Malay), 2023.
LOVE & KINDNESS @ The Order of Nature
18 November – 23 December 2023
Yavuz Gallery, Gillman Barracks, 9 Lock Road, Singapore
LOVE & KINDNESS is a new work by Brook Andrew especially made for the group exhibition The Order of Nature at Yavuz Gallery in Singapore. The exhibition takes the recent repeal of Section 377A in the Singapore Constitution as its starting point, a law introduced to the country in 1871 under British colonial rule that criminalised sex between two men. Featuring internationally acclaimed artists Brook Andrew, Clive van den Berg, Skyler Chen, Sunil Gupta, Alvin Ong and Jason Wee, the exhibition explores the emotional everyday of queer identities and how this collides with our current inheritances of colonial rule.
LOVE & KINDNESS acknowledges the many histories and identities of Singapore with neon text in Wiradjuri, Mandarin, Tamil and Malay. The wall drawing featuring Brook’s distinctive black and white hypnotic pattern offers a portal to new imaginings and futures where love and kindness rule.
For more information visit: https://privateviews.artlogic.net/2/df56b4c0bfed24907ff174/
Biennial participation
Exhibition view, 22nd Biennial Sesc_Videobrasil, October 2023.
NENHUMA MEMÓRIA WIRA MEMORY at 22nd Biennial Sesc_Videobrasil
18 October 2023 - 28 April 2024
Sesc 24 de Maio, São Paulo, Brazil
Brook created a new work with neon and wall drawing for the 22nd Biennial Sesc_Videobrasil, “Memory is an editing station” curated by Raphael Fonseca and Renée Akitelek Mboya. NENHUMA MEMÓRIA WIRA MEMORY evokes memory through poetry ‘into life wira (no) memory forgets everything until death’, to question what happens to memory when we die.
Four decades after holding the first Videobrasil festival in the final years of the civil-military dictatorship that haunted Brazil, the 22nd Biennial Sesc_Videobrasil | 40-Year Special occupies Sesc 24 de Maio between October 18, 2023 and February 25, 2024. Under the title "Memory is an Editing Station”, the exhibition dialogues with the event’s long trajectory, while simultaneously reflecting on the present moment of the world and pointing to future paths, through the works of 60 artists from the Global South.
New work
Brook Andrew, Pundits Accountable, 2008/2023.
Pundits Accountable from Liverpool Biennial
Limited Edition Lascaux screenprint by Brook Andrew, entitled Pundits Accountable (2008/2023). The work is a screenprint of an existing collage originally produced in 2008. The original work is composed of black and gold ink and collage of cut out newspaper on canvas.
This new screenprint for Liverpool Biennial serves as a companion piece to the artist’s outdoor installation, NGAAY (2023), a large-scale neon work which was produced for Liverpool Biennial 2023, uMoya: The Sacred Return of Lost Things, and exhibited at Stanley Dock. ‘NGAAY’ (2023) is a Wiradjuri word meaning ‘to see’.
For more information or to purchase visit: https://www.biennial.com/product/pundits-accountable-2023/
Group exhibition
Exhibition View, Dream Variations, 2023. Commissioned by Parallel. Image by Jeremy Weihrauch.
GARRU NGAJUU NGAAY at Dream Variations
20 October 2023 - 16 February 2024
Murray Art Museum Albury
Curated by Kelly Dezart-Smith, Dream Variations guides us through an intersectional bla(c)k poetics of freedom and its prohibition within the Murray Art Museum Albury collection. The exhibition includes rarely shown sculptures, paintings, and photographs from the collection alongside a new video commission, Green Pastures (2023) by emerging artists Olivia Oluwayemi Suleimon and Albury-based Naomi Impa Musemu, to hold a conversation about bla(c)k creativity and self-determination.
The exhibition includes an iteration of Brook Andrew’s GARRU NGAJUU NGAAY, a site specific wall drawing with neon and text, which the museum first acquired in 2021.
Group exhibition
Exhibition views, Seeds and Souls. Images courtesy of Kunsthal Charlottenborg.
ngaay ngajuu dhugul birra (to see my skin broken) at Seeds and Souls
16 September 2023 – 18 February 2024
Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen
Curated by Christine Eyene, Seeds and Souls proposes new explorations into the connections between botanical histories, colonial legacies and diasporic experiences. Participating artists: Brook Andrew, Shiraz Bayjoo, Sonia Boyce, Ishita Chakraborty, Annalee Davis, Michelle Eistrup, Sheroanawe Hakihiiwe, Linda Lamignan, Yvon Ngassam.
First exhibited at Galerie Nathalie Obadia in 2022 Brook Andrew’s ngayy ngajuu dhugul birra (to see my skin broken) is a series of paintings and ceramic sculptures that create a dynamic mise-en-scene. The work reflects on the difficult processes of accessing our cultural materials in museum collections and imagines new ways of being with these subjects in safe spaces of healing and radical self-love.
Acknowledgement
Brook Andrew, burbangbuwanha winha-nga-nha (Returned Ceremony of Memory), 2023.
burbangbuwanha winha-nga-nha (Returned Ceremony of Memory) recognised in Artsy’s The Best Public Art of 2023
Brook’s commission for the 15th Sharjah Biennial was recently included in Artsy’s The Best Public Art of 2023 according to curators. Assessed on their public impact, this list includes works by Tracey Emin, Megan Cope and Ibrahim Mahama among other inspiring artists. Brook’s work was recognised for epitomising Okwui Enwezor’s vision to disrupt “canonized ideas around centers and peripheries, bringing perspectives deliberately obscured to the fore… Dismantling structures which have long dictated social, geographic, and historical dynamics, burbangbuwanha winha-nga-nha (Returned Ceremony of Memory) presented a poignant and assertive challenge to persistent colonial legacies.”
Solo exhibition
Exhibition view of From the Collection: Brook Andrew, 2022. Penrith Regional Gallery.
bulangumbaay (three) (2022) at Penrith Regional Gallery
27 August - 27 November 2022
From the Collection: Brook Andrew
Penrith Regional Gallery
Brook was commissioned to create a new wall drawing for an exhibition of his works in the collection of Penrith Regional Gallery. From the Collection: Brook Andrew included works from the 2005 series Hope and Peace which Brook donated to the gallery in 2009.
Experience the exhibition here:
https://artsandculture.google.com/story/wgURtSRAb_fQZA
Group exhibition
100 faces
4 March – 28 May 2023
Monash Gallery of Art, Wheelers Hill
Two early photographic works by Brook Andrew from the Harris and Rosenthal collections are featured in this exhibition: Sexy and dangerous II and I split your gaze, both made in 1997.
Through the lenses of over 50 artists, 100 faces brings together 100 works drawn from three photographic collections to explore the portrait in its many forms, as well as what it means to collect portraiture both publicly and privately.
Group exhibition
Australiana: Designing a Nation
18 March - 25 June 2023
Bendigo Art Gallery
Australiana: Designing a Nation surveys the iconography of Australiana in art and design. The exhibition includes work from the gallery’s collection by Brook: The Island IV, 2008.
Intervention
Photo: Jenni Carter, courtesy of AGNSW
Tombs of Thought at the Grand Courts, Art Gallery of New South Wales
2022
Art Gallery of NSW
Sydney
Tombs of Thought (2017-2018) is a series of five sculptural vitrines, each corresponding to one of the five elements of Wu Xing: Water, Air, Fire, Earth and Metal. There have been several iterations of this work, each using archival and vernacular objects to present alternative histories that are otherwise hidden beneath colonial narratives.
The sculptural vitrines were acquired by the Art Gallery of New South Wales in 2018 after they were included in the 21st Biennale of Sydney (2018). Now on display in the Grand Courts, this presentation of Tombs of Thought explores and subverts museum conventions around collection and display, drawing from AGNSW’s collection and responding to works exhibited throughout the 19th-century galleries.
Find out more about the work here.
Tombs of Thought is also featured in the April-May issue of AGNSW’s Look Magazine. Read the feature here.
Group exhibition
Brook Andrew, from the series Livin’ it up 1995. Gelatin silver print, 20.32 x 25.4 cm.
Queering the Frame: Community, Time, Photography
29 April - 12 June 2022
PHOTO2022
Centre for Contemporary Photography, Melbourne
Presented as part of PHOTO2022, Queering the Frame: Community, Time, Photography takes a multi-generational approach to Australian queer histories. For the exhibition, Brook will be presenting a new iteration of his work Livin’ it up, a series of photographs taken in the mid-90s in Redfern.
“It was a day of dress up and hanging out on Cleveland Street and Prince Alfred Park. We hung out in Vicky’s home with Rossy, Paul and other friends, and made the costumes out of found objects and a dress up bag. It was a special day to celebrate life as these were tough times through the AIDS epidemic and ongoing racism.” - Brook Andrew
Collection exhibition
Brook Andrew, Peace, 2005. Colour screen print.
Brook Andrew: Hope, Peace and Paradise, Geelong Art Gallery
16 July - 23 October 2022
Geelong Art Gallery
Little Malop Street, Geelong 3220, Victoria, AU
This exhibition honours a significant gift to the Gallery by Brook with a selection of works that represents his longstanding practice of combining diverse images and text to reclaim Indigenous language as a counter to, and examination of dominant cultural narratives.
Exhibited for the first time since their acquisition in 2020, this selection of works includes dazzling colour screenprints from the 2005 series Hope and Peace, produced in collaboration with Melbourne-based master printer Larry Rawling, and the major installation 18 Lives in Paradise 2011.
Announcement
Photo: Courtesy of Footscray Community Arts. Image by Gianna Rizzo.
Restoration of Marks I at Footscray Community Arts
Footscray Community Arts
Melbourne
In 2012, to mark the opening of Footscray Community Arts’ newly developed spaces, Brook was invited to develop a new outdoor work for the Warehouse building. In collaboration with community members, Brook created Marks I, a black and white wall painting with a pattern inspired by traditional Wiradjuri practices of carving. Since then, the work has become visually synonymous with art and activism in Melbourne’s West.
By 2020, Marks I showed considerable damage after 9 years of exposure to the elements. Following a fundraising campaign, Footscray Community Arts were able to clean, refit and repaint the work.
Find out more about the creation and restoration of Marks I
Group exhibition
This year, raking over..., 2020
screen print, photoprint, digital print, textile, paper and neon
161.5 x 308 x 9.5 cm
경로를 재탐색합니다 UN/LEARNING AUSTRALIA
14 December - 6 March, 2022
Seoul Museum of Art & Artspace
Brook will present a selection of artworks from the series “This year“, 2020, and a wall drawing. He has also been commissioned to create a new artwork for SeMA to be presented in the museum’s cafe.
Artspace is pleased to announce 경로를 재탐색합니다 UN/LEARNING AUSTRALIA, a large-scale project co-curated with the Seoul Museum of Art (SeMA), which will be held at SeMA from December 14, 2021 to March 6, 2022. The project surveys Australian contemporary art through an exhibition across two levels of SeMA, new online commissions, and a print publication.
Commemorating the 60th anniversary of diplomatic relations between Australia and South Korea, 경로를 재탐색합니다 UN/LEARNING AUSTRALIA amplifies artistic practice representing contemporary issues vital to Australia and invites audiences to examine privilege, dominance, and power from several perspectives. The project unpacks the complexity of national histories and the present moment to reveal self-presentations, multiple knowledges and forms of resistance that challenge the standard representations of Australia.
Press release here
Group exhibition
Untitled (Waterfall) 2017
Paper, acrylic polymer paint, metallic pigment powder, neon and glue on dibond
160 x 240 cm
Ways to Water
6 November – 6 February 2022
Wollongong Art Gallery
Ways to Water traces stories of coastal changes across the Illawarra, South Coast, and New South Wales. The exhibition brings together fifty key historical and contemporary works from Wollongong Art Gallery and University of Wollongong collections – as well as original artworks and interactive augmented reality – to highlight the complex shifts through physical and imagined encounters between Land Country and Sea Country.
The series of thematic displays connects diverse perspectives from creative, cultural, educational and scientific disciplines to respond to the question: how can ocean-based sustainable development be achieved in the context of coastal change?
Publication
DIWIL
September 2021
In September 2021, the Murray Art Museum Albury (MAMA) launched a beautiful publication which brings together poetic, personal and critical written work from First Nations writers of divergent interests responding to Brook Garru Andrew’s exhibition, DIWIL.
Tina Baum, Tristen Harwood, Pettina Love, Jazz Money, Lorna Munro and Joel Spring each bring a differing approach, process, and lens to reading and walking within DIWIL.
The DIWIL Writers Program was supported by Murray Arts. The publication was designed by Formist and is now available in the MAMA store.
You can purchase the publication at the MAMA.
New work
GABAN
18 and 19 June 2021
On 18th and 19th June 2021, VCA Acting and Design and Production students performed GABAN, a new play by Brook Andrew, with direction by Budi Miller. This production did not represent Brook's visual or creative output but was staged for the purpose of clarifying the final written script.
GABAN is an outcome of Brook’s DPhil research at the University of Oxford. Brook is currently developing a production of GABAN for exhibition in 2022 at the Gropius Bau, Berlin.
“Gaban is a Wiradjuri word meaning strange. It is the title for my work of ngarranga-birdyulang dhadharra (post-traumatic theatre), an experimental story which is presented as a theatre script and performance. The aim of writing GABAN was to find a mode of practice in which I could unpack the effects of the museum, rooted in its histories of collecting and displaying Indigenous cultures and bodies, but without repeating the trauma it continues to inflict upon myself and others. I wanted to create distance from such pain and a pathway to healing by imagining what the objects and identities trapped within the colonial museum context would be if they could perform and speak their own narratives.” Brook Andrew
Upcoming talk
Roundtable: Visualizing Indigenous Worlds, at the NAISA 2021, an online symposium, June 14-21, 2021
Panelists:
Dr. Jolene Rickard, United States - Cornell University
Dr. Patricia Norby, United States - Metropolitan Museum of Art
Dr. Brook Garru Andrew, Australia - University of Melbourne
Dr. heather ahtone, United States - First Americans Museum
Mr. Nigel Borell, New Zealand - Auckland Art Gallery Toi O Tamaki
more info: https://www.naisa.org/annual-meeting/
Group exhibition
Tree Story at Monash Museum of Art (MUMA)
6 February – 10 April 2021
Installation view, Tree Story, Monash University Museum of Art, Melbourne, Australia, 2021. Photo: Christian Capurro
Tree Story featured Brook's artwork and research, Powerful Object: Dendroglyph, 2020, a three-dimensional model made from a dendroglyph tree section housed in the Pitt Rivers Museum, the University of Oxford. The tree section was removed from its traditional Country - most likely Wiradjuri or Gamilaroi - in the late 19th century.
You can find out more about this work and the exhibition Tree Story in the exhibition catalogue available from MUMA, which includes a conversation between Brook Garru Andrew and Dr Brian Martin. https://publishing.monash.edu/product/tree-story/
Curators: Charlotte Day with Dr Brian Martin, Associate Dean, Indigenous, Monash Art Design & Architecture
Artists: Brook Garru Andrew (AU), Yto Barrada (FR/MA), Berdaguer & Péjus (FR), Joseph Beuys (DE), Tania Bruguera (CU), Hayley Panangka Coulthard (AU), Nici Cumpston (AU), Agnes Denes (HU/US), Yanni Florence (AU), Ceal Floyer (UK), Nicole Foreshew (AU), Henrik Håkansson (SE/DE), Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti (PS/IT), Beth Mbitjana Inkamala (AU), Judith Pungarta Inkamala (AU), Tim Johnson (AU), Reena Saini Kallat (IN), Peter Kennedy (AU), Olga Kisseleva (RU/FR), Janet Laurence (AU), MAIX Reserved Forest (MY), Brian Martin (AU), Kent Morris (AU), Peter Mungkuri OAM (AU), Optronic Kinetics (AU), Uriel Orlow (CH/UK), Jill Orr (AU), Katie Paterson (UK), Ed Ruscha (US), Yasmin Smith (AU), Daniel Steegmann Mangrané (BR/ES), Stelarc (AU) and Linda Tegg (AU)
Group exhibition
Space YZ at Campbelltown Arts Centre
7 January – 14 March 2021
In times of alarmingly diminishing art school options in the tertiary and higher education systems, Space YZ, commissioned by Campbelltown Arts Centre and curated by Daniel Mudie Cunningham, draws inspiration from the visual arts legacy of Western Sydney University (formerly known as University of Western Sydney).
The C-A-C team recreated one of Brook's earliest works as a banner installed outside the gallery.
Read Brook's reflection here about his time at the art school in Western Sydney.
Brook Andrew, Naraga Yarmble, Bungle-gara-gara, 1993/2021
Banner, 160 x 1280 cm.
Acknowledgements
Artsy - The Most Influential Artists of 2020
“At the start of 2020, it was impossible to predict that this year would transform the art world as we knew it. By March, the COVID-19 pandemic began to throw entire years of museum, gallery, and biennial exhibitions into the balance, and it may have forever rocked the international art fair circuit. In June, the Black Lives Matter movement swept through the art world and ushered in a long overdue reckoning with the inequity and systemic racism of the art industry.
The artists below were at the forefront of these waves of change. They created fresh work to live up to this moment and launched fundraisers and initiatives to aid victims of COVID-19, promote BIPOC organizations, and lift up fellow artists. Some managed to set head-spinning auction records and opened spectacular museum shows; others set career milestones and earned due recognition for their longstanding, influential practices. They represent a small fraction of the artists who inspired us this year, though they stand out as leaders who will surely guide us through the next one and whatever it may bring.”
from https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-influential-artists-2020
Acknowledgements
ArtReview - The Power 100: the Most Influential People in the Artworld in 2020
”The Power 100 has always been an attempt to track the forces that shape art in the contemporary moment. It’s neither about building egos or backslapping, nor is it a manifesto. Its primary function is to track who or what is influencing the art that’s being made today. A snapshot, if you like, that seeks to highlight what’s going on in the art world and who is providing it with impetus. Part science, part instinct, it operates according to the following criteria: are the individuals on the list influencing the kind of art that’s being produced and being made visible (invariably not the same thing)? To what extent does their influence extend beyond the local to the global? And how active have they been in demonstrating their influence over the past 12 months? And perhaps this year, more than any of the other past 18 years of the Power 100’s existence, how in tune is the artworld with the real world in which it exists? Which, to some degree, might be a reflection, or the sound, of certain bubbles having been burst. But despite what you hear, 2020 has not only been about the effects of COVID-19. Things have been in motion, both because of the virus and because of the way in which it has exposed ongoing societal problematics. And so ArtReview’s list has been in motion too.”
from https://artreview.com/introducing-the-power-100-the-most-influential-people-in-the-artworld-in-2020/
Group Exhibition
A Fair Share of Utopia - NEST, The Hague.
3 Sep – 22 Nov 2020
Guest curated by Manon Braat, the exhibition’s aim was to inspire a conscious (re)thinking about potential alternative realities as a method of addressing global systematic inequalities.
Brook Andrew’s video art work SMASH IT 2018 was featured at NEST in The Hague.
Brook Andrew, SMASH IT, 2018. Single video projection, 25 minutes, edited by Giacomo Sanzani and Brook Andrew.
Group Exhibition
13 Sept – 25 Oct 2020
Brook recently participated in the group exhibition Sports Show at the new artist-run initiative PARI in Parramatta, featuring his work Australia I Black Gold, 2012. The exhibition presented a live commentary on how the mechanisms of sport can connect to other elements of society, culture and history.
“Humans are social creatures, relying on sense of collective identity to ensure emotional and physical wellbeing. Brook Andrew’s tableau, Australia I, 2012, is an acknowledgement of the vital role collective physical activity plays in the creation of a community. Based on a colonial ethnographic study from the late 1850s, the work depicts a group of Nyeri-Nyeri men from north-western Victoria participating in a game of marngrook, an indigenous precursor to Australian Rules football.”
- Catalogue text written by Lucie Reeves-Smith
Australia I Black Gold, 2012, 95 x 155 cm black ink on gold foil
Group Exhibition
Love Among the Artists
Netwerk Aalst, Aalst, Belgium
5 Sep – 18 Oct 2020
Curated by Laure Prouvost, Love among the artist was a group exhibition in the Belgian city of Aalst featuring Brook Andrew’s new mixed-media installation and performace ngajuu ngaay nginduugirr (I see you) again, 2020. The exhibition explores the role of artists in imagining possible futures and new ways of connecting.
Installation view, ngajuu ngaay nginduugirr (I see you) again, 2020. Mixed-media, performance, variable dimensions.
Art Fair
1 – 31 October 2020
Brook had three new artworks exhibited at Sydney Contemporary 2020 through Tolarno Galleries and Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery. The artworks on show were created as part of the series This Year 2020.
Brook Andrew
This year, the bench..., 2020
paper, wood, neon, acrylic
85 x 100 x 8.5 cm
Announcement
Indigenous Artists will transform Nordic Pavilion into Sámi Pavilion for the 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia in 2022
The Office for Contemporary Art Norway (OCA) has announced from the Sámi Parliament in Kárášjohka, in the Norwegian part of Sápmi, that Sámi artists Pauliina Feodoroff, Máret Ánne Sara and Anders Sunna will represent Sápmi, their Sámi homeland, and transform the Nordic Pavilion into the Sámi Pavilion at the 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia in 2022. This is an historic moment: the first time that Sámi artists are presented exclusively in a national pavilion at the Biennale Arte, and the first time the Sámi are recognised as a nation in a pavilion bearing their name.
The project also benefits from an international group of advisers, including Brook Andrew, who is a Wiradjuri interdisciplinary artist and scholar, and was Artistic Director of NIRIN, 22nd Biennale of Sydney 2020; Associate Professor, Fine Art, Monash University; and Enterprise Professor in Interdisciplinary practice.
Left to right: Pauliina Feodoroff, Máret Ánne Sara, Anders Sunna.
Photos by Per-Josef Idivuoma, Marie Louise Somby, Erik Persson.
Solo Exhibition
PICA (Perth Institute of Creative Arts) Screen Space
SMASH IT featured at PICA Screen Space 3 November 2020 - 10 January 2021.
Brook Andrew, SMASH IT, 2018. Single video projection, 25 minutes, edited by Giacomo Sanzani and Brook Andrew.
We are delighted to invite you to attend a live 'in conversation' between Brook Andrew & Alexie Glass-Kantor to mark the occasion of Andrew's exhibition This Year, currently on display at Roslyn Oxley9 Gallery. As one of Australia's most exciting and prominent artists, Brook Andrew’s interdisciplinary practice challenges the limitations imposed by power structures, historical amnesia, stereotyping and complicity. Interweaving Wiradjuri language, collective memory, history and culture with museum intervention, Andrew recreates powerful contemporary images of Indigenous identity. Alexie Glass-Kantor is the Executive Director, Artspace, Sydney, and Curator, Encounters, Art Basel Hong Kong. Glass-Kantor is the curator for the forthcoming Australian Pavilion at the 59th International Art Exhibition of la Biennale di Venezia.
Wed, 7 October 2020; 8:00 AM – 9:00 AM CEST; Online Event
Talk
musée du quai Branly - Jacques Chirac, Paris
Theater Claude Lévi-Strauss. Thursday October 01 2020, 09:30 to 18:00
Théâtre Claude Lévi-Strauss. Le jeudi 01 octobre 2020 de 09:30 à 18:00
The "Re-keep" colloquium is organized as part of the scientific and cultural program of the exhibition "To you belongs the gaze and (...) the infinite connection between things". For two days, it will allow you to hear the words of several artists presented in the exhibition, but also to benefit from the expertise of international critics and art historians through conferences, round tables and debates. . To look, reminds us of the art historian Georges Didi-Huberman referring to Littré, is to re-keep (from the German verb warten). It's coming back to someone or something, stopping there, watching it. Etymologically associated with this activity is the notion of respect. Thought about this way, in a world of clicks, zaps and scans, the gaze turns into choice, better still, into taking a position. Managed by the artists gathered in the exhibition to which this colloquium is articulated, this position is political. The political outlook we are talking about here is not partisan; it is above all ethical and committed. It aims to create, or at least to propose a less radically unjust world, to question its stories. The words of the artists and researchers, critics and curators who animate this day of the conference are centered on the search for this objective. Conferences, dialogues between speakers, conversations with several voices and with the public, round tables will punctuate our exchanges.
RENCONTRES autour de l’exposition A toi appartient le regard et (…) la liaison infinie entre les choses. Conférences, dialogues entre intervenants, conversations à plusieurs voix et avec le public, tables rondes rythmeront nos échanges. Format hybride (présentiel et distanciel) en live streaming sur la chaine YouTube du musée du quai Branly - Jacques Chirac Présence, absence, distance : des mots en apparence simples mais qui se chargent d’un sens nouveau, d’une urgence face à la crise du coronavirus et du ralentissement, voire du gel des activités qui en résultent. Des mots aussi qui résonnent étrangement dans le cadre de l’exposition A toi appartient le regard. C’est que l’objectif premier de cette exposition, comme le veut son titre, c’est de faire liaison. Liaison entre les œuvres, les artistes, les publics. Le colloque international qui devait accompagner l’exposition visait lui aussi à lier ; mais la tenue a dû en être reportée… virus oblige. Nous ne baissons pas les bras. Aussi proposons-nous cette rencontre d’une journée. Hybride – en partie zoomée, en partie live – elle annonce une autre rencontre, le colloque à proprement parler, qui aura lieu à l’automne 2021. Il s’agit ici, maintenant comme dans un an, mais de manière plus concise, de centrer l’écoute sur la parole de celles et ceux qui créent : les artistes. Link here
Online Exhibition
1 – 6 June 2020
Brook contributed to Artspace’s latest online commissioning platform 52 ACTIONS showcasing new works across their digital platforms.
“In this moment when cultural experiences are taking place at a physical distance, 52 ACTIONS speculates on new methods for survival and revival, offering a space for artists and audiences to continue sharing and connecting with one another. This evolving project centres around the social and cultural importance of artistic practice and art as action in times of uncertainty and transformation.”
“In a new series of collages, I have worked directly with an original edition (c. 1860) of engravings from the complete works of the British pictorial satirist and painter William Hogarth. Through frantic actions of cutting and pasting, I rethread the nineteenth century satire for a contemporary age, smashing together disparate elements of printed matter in a method of editorial montage. Drawing from my own archive, sources include The Saturday Paper, The Australian, Flash Art, auction house magazines, Phantom cartoon magazines and historical anthropological texts, which are used alongside watercolour. My collages reveal the repetitive nature of human involvement in environmental and inter-human conflict since industrialisation and colonisation to our current moments of shifting alliances. Desire for and obsession with capital, race and catastrophe conflate and spiral through past and present trajectories, where satirical and ‘factual’ news and headlines repeat. The works suggest that little human learning concerning the protection of the environment and human-kind seems to have greatly evolved – are we really stuck in this forsaken dark abyss?” - artist statement
Award
2020 Australia Council Awards recipients. Image courtesy of the Australia Council for the Arts.
Brook Andrew received the 2020 Australia Council Award for Visual Arts on 9 March 2020.
These prestigious national awards recognise outstanding and sustained contributions by Australian artists in music, literature, community arts and cultural development (CACD), emerging and experimental arts, visual arts, theatre, and dance.
“Brook is one of Australia’s most distinguished artists and his contribution to contemporary visual arts in Australia and globally is significant.” Laura McLeod, Director Visual Arts, Australia Council for the Arts
Installation view of Weapons for the Soldier featuring Brook Andrew, Nation’s Party, 2016, at Hazelhurst Arts Centre, 2019. Image courtesy of Hazelhurst Arts Centre.
Group exhibition
Nation’s Party (2016) included in the group exhibition Weapons for the Soldier: Protecting Culture, Family and Country, a project initiated by the young men of the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunyjatjara (APY) Lands, Vincent Namatjira, Aaron Ken, Derek Thompson, Anwar Young and Kamurin Young, with support from senior artists Willy Kaika Burton, Ray Ken, Peter Mungkuri, Mumu Mike Williams and Frank Young. Developed in partnership between the APY Art Centre Collective in and Hazelhurst Arts Centre.
“The tjilpies [senior men] from the APY Lands have spent their lives protecting Tjukurpa [Culture], Country and family. For Anangu this is the most important thing. From working with other artists we have found that there is common ground here. Connection to Country and protecting Country is something that artists from all over Australia make work and share stories about. This has become the heart of the project.” Frank Young, Chairman APY Lands Executive Board
Weapons for the soldier is a partnership project between the APY Art Centre Collective and Hazelhurst Arts Centre. The exhibition tour has been assisted by the Australian Government's Visions of Australia program. The project has been supported by the Australian Government’s Anzac Centenary Arts and Culture Fund, the Australia Council for the Arts, Arts SA, Create NSW, Sutherland Shire Council and the Gordon Darling Foundation.
Touring in 2020: Latrobe Regional Gallery 22 February to 17 May 2020
Touring in 2019: 2 March-22 April 2019 Araluen Arts CentreMurray Bridge Regional Gallery September 14 - 3 November 2019; Bega Valley Regional Gallery 16 November 2019 - 8 February 2020.
First shown at Hazelhurst Arts Centre, 11 Nov 2018 - 3 Feb 2019.
Installation view of RocoColonial featuring Brook Andrew's Mirror IV (stripes), 2017, at Hazelhurst Arts Centre, 2019. Photo: silversalt
Group exhibition
Mirror IV (2017) included in the group exhibition RocoColonial, a major artist-initiated project by Gary Carsley and presented by Hazelhurst Arts Centre in partnership with Bathurst Regional Art Gallery.
“Rococo and Colonial are often considered to be disparate, undisputable categories that neatly divide periods of time. This separation offers little opportunity to consider parallel histories - how similar or different things might be happening elsewhere or at the same time. RocoColonial was an exhibition that examined the overlap between Rococo and Colonial and begins by acknowledging that both can be intrinsically related and link Australia to a wider, speculative world of multiple, concurrent histories.”
Touring in 2020: Lismore Regional Gallery 15 February - 19 April
Touring in 2019: Hazelhurst Arts Centre 4 May - 30 June, Bathurst Regional Art Gallery, 2 August - 22 September
Brook Andrew, SMASH IT, 2018. Single video projection, 25 minutes, edited by Giacomo Sanzani and Brook Andrew.
Group exhibition
SMASH IT included in the group exhibition Australia, Antipodean Stories curated by Eugenio Viola for PAC Padiglione d'Arte Contemporanea, Milan.
“Australia, Antipodean Stories is the largest exhibition of contemporary art to be presented outside Australia, and includes 32 artists from established to emerging and from different generations and cultural backgrounds.”
17 December 2019 - 9 February 2020