Ausstellungsansicht No Feeling Is Final. The Skopje Solidarity Collection: Brook Andrew, mulunma wiling mangi gudhi (inside the lip of a stolen song) [In der Lippe eines gestohlenen Liedes] (Detail), 2023, Kunsthalle Wien 2023, Foto: www.kunst-dokumentation.com

Installation view No Feeling Is Final. The Skopje Solidarity Collection: Brook Andrew, mulunma wilingmangi gudhi (inside the lip of a stolen song) (detail), 2023, Kunsthalle Wien 2023, photo: www.kunst-dokumentation.com

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mulunma wiling mangi gudhi (inside the lip of a stolen song) at No Feeling is Final, The Skopje Solidarity Collection

mulunma wiling mangi gudhi (inside the lip of a stolen song) is a new commission for No Feeling is Final, The Skopje Solidarity Collection curated by What, How & for Whom / WHW (Ivet Ćurlin, Nataša Ilić and Sabina Sabolović). Artist and curator Brook Andrew challenges the limitations imposed by hegemonic power structures to make space for Indigenous systems of being and of knowing. His research as well as artistic practice is often rooted in his own Wiradjuri and Celtic ancestry, motivating him to develop kinship with non-western cultures that share an intersectional understanding of indigeneity. His work has often led him to intervene in museum displays and to work with objects usually found in museum collections. In so doing, he uncovers links to colonialism, cultural expropriation and violence while centering indigenous practices as a non-colonial force able to fracture western ideas such as progress, linearity or the art-historical canon and the institutions which support it.

In Andrew’s installation, eight works from the collection are placed on a large-scale, strikingly patterned inflatable object and wall mural. The pattern is based on aboriginal carvings that were made into living trees in a process that ceremonially signifies change. Akin to an optical illusion, the pattern is playful, yet also pointing towards underlying truths such as the many shifts of identity undergone not only by the modernist works – western and non-western – but also the city of Skopje itself. The works from the collection are carefully arranged on the mural, Picasso being at the very top. There are dates ranging from 1963-1968 under five of them. Together they form an arrowhead and delineate a specific moment in time when these works were part of a very specific value system, particularly in favour of male western artists – the same artists who had often appropriated non-western art practices and artists. This idea is also expressed in the title of the installation, mulunma wiling mangi gudhi, which translates into ‘inside the lip of a stolen song’ and hints at the thin line between appropriation and theft.

Andrew’s work with inflatable structures utilizes the methods of enlargement and inflation to recontextualise history and make often overlooked topics appear larger-than-life. The installation spatially reconciles the many contradictory meanings of the loaded modernist discourse which informed the inception of the Solidarity Collection of the MoCA Skopje. It both celebrates and honors spaces that allowed for such solidarity moments to materialize while also clearly addressing their many problematic aspects and continuing repercussions.

No Feeling is Final, The Skopje Solidarity Collection
Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna
20 April 2023 - 28 January 2024