yaala /now

Publication

“marramarra: Indigenous artists making history visible”; published November 2024, by Brook Garru Andrew, Jessica Neath

Garru Editions is proud to co-publish with NewSouth 'marramarra: Indigenous artists making history visible; published November 2024, by Brook Garru Andrew, Jessica Neath

9781742237039 / 1 November 2024 / Paperback / 256pp / 260x210mm / GEN / AUD$49.99, NZD$57.99

More info at https://newsouthbooks.com.au/books/marramarra/

Buy book: Paperback / ePDF

Public art commission

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Publication

‘Mother Tongues, Water Memory, and Kinships’ in Portable Grey

A conversation between Natasha Ginwala and Brook Andrew published in the special issue of Portable Grey, University of Chicago Arts, dedicated to family. Comfort or cage, for centuries family has served as an ever-reliable inspiration and source material for the arts and literature. It is also a flash point for some of the most fierce and poignant political debates of our times, touching on topics ranging from public health and reproductive justice; representation and citizenship; cultural infrastructure and ethical business practices; to re-matriation and the stewardship of the environment. This issue offers a kaleidoscopic view on the subject of family with contributions from archivists, artists, curators, dramaturgs, gallerists, literary scholars, musicians, novelists, skateboarders, theater directors, and the Chicago Abortion Fund.

Full issue available here: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/toc/pog/2023/6/1

Download a PDF of the conversation between Natasha and Brook here.

Acknowledgement

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

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.

Garru Editions

galang 02, published in collaboration with the Powerhouse Museum and Garru Editions, November 2022

The galang collective convenes regularly to discuss the role of museums and other cultural institutions in the past and present colonisation of First Nations people. It’s a sovereign space to share culture and creative practice, and challenge narratives of sovereignty, decolonisation, identity, power and language.

galang 02 is grounded by connection to Place, Earth, Country and Land. Gail Mabo reflects on her father Eddie Koiki Mabo’s landmark claim to Mer and how profound ties to Place influence her artwork, while Lisa Hilli explores unspoken bonds with her Papua New Guinean family and environment. New contributors Beaska Niillas and Denilson Baniwa take intimate journeys on Country, as does Brook Garru Andrew in his visit on Country with kin and elders to highlight the importance of trees. Kinships become fundamental grounding points when Mayunkiki talks about what it means to be Ainu and Liisa-Rávná Finbog traces a path between the personal and the political as she considers Indigenous sovereignty.

galang 02 is available (RRP $60) at:
https://shop.maas.museum/products/galang-02

A companion volume, galang 01, was published in March 2022.
Both volumes are available packaged together in a slipcase (RRP $100) at:
https://shop.maas.museum/products/galang-01-02

Intervention

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.

Publication

galang collective and “galang 01”

2022

see GARRU EDITIONS

The galang collective convenes regularly to discuss the role of museums and other cultural institutions in the past and present colonisation of First Nations people. It is a sovereign space to share culture and creative practice, and challenge narratives of sovereignty, decolonisation, identity, power and language.

“galang 01” brings together transcripts of the collective’s powerful and moving conversations with individual members’ contributions. Essays from Léuli Eshrãghi, Liisa-Rávná Finbog and Biung Ismahasan explore the representation of First Nations art and culture; Mayunkiki and her collaborator Kanoko Tamura exchange a series of text messages that range across Indigenous identity, struggle and support; Brook gives insight into his creative process with poems and sketches from his journals; and Emily McDaniel, Director First Nations at the Powerhouse, reflects on yindyamarra in the museum. First Nations designer Jenna Lee has designed the book as an object that has no beginning or end to reflect the circularity of time and stories that fold and turn on themselves.

“galang 01” will be available to purchase shortly. A companion volume, “galang 02”, will be published in November 2022. galang volumes 01 and 02 are published in collaboration with the Powerhouse museum and Garru Editions.

Group exhibition

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

Talk

“ngaay girr (to see the object)”, talk at Reclaim the Earth

18 May 2022

Palais de Tokyo
Paris, France

Brook will be speaking on ngaay girr (to see the object) at Palais de Tokyo, Paris. This talk is part of the public program accompanying Reclaim the Earth, a group exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo from 15 April to 4 September, 2022. Reclaim the Earth addresses the destructive force of colonialism on Indigenous cultures and societies by reimagining and recovering artists’ connection with territory, land and nature. Brook’s talk also coincides with his solo exhibition at the Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris.

“Objects of desire and extreme curiosity, even bafflement are often taken away, stolen and hidden, re-written and smashed apart. I am interested in how my own Wiradjuri (Aboriginal Australian) cultural heritage is reflected in museum collections of objects and to what degree do they exist for me now, what is their power, their strategy? Finding new ways to remember and remake objects from my parents’ cultures is central to my practice. This speaks to reparations and healing, to flipping power, to safeguarding a different kind of girri (future), one that is not all consumed by the colonial wuba (hole).” – Brook Andrew

Collection exhibition

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.

news

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

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

Publication

Dual/Duel

November 2021

Dual/Duel is a collaborative artists' book by Brook Andrew and Trent Walter, drawn predominantly from the State Library of Victoria's pictures collection, with interventions from the artists' personal archives. The book's form is a series of juxtaposed image propositions whose assembly forms new relational narratives connecting the artists' cultural perspectives of Wiradjuri/Sri Lankan/Celtic/European with topics of conflict, immigration, hope, confusion,complicity and power amongst image, shape, trickery, concealment and shadow play. This practice of image juxtaposition is prevalent in Andrew's and Walter's artistic and cultural practices which re-define how the world can be reordered and seen. This perspective shifts ideas around building memories, timelines and making visible often devastating histories in ways that can hopefully heal: to imagine new ways to engage and acknowledge.

Dual/Duel creates a new space for looking through often cliché, but specific, images of power and narrative. The artists' book simultaneously creates and examines pictorial connections that explore the implications of these associations to form new narratives about how we might begin to explain the histories they conjure.

Dual/Duel is the result of a Georges Mora Fellowship awarded to the artists in 2014. The publication includes an interview with Maxine Briggs, Koori Librarian at the State Library of Victoria (SLV), Australia, who worked closely with the artists on Australian Indigenous protocols that apply to SLV photographic collections.

Published by Garru Editions and Negative Press, Melbourne, Australia

More information here

Group exhibition

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?

Panel

Re-Negotiating Narrative Frameworks Across the Art Historical Canon

18 November 2021

"Re-Negotiating Narrative Frameworks Across the Art Historical Canon" with Brook Andrew, Parul Dave-Mukherji, Amy Whitaker and Stephen Murphy.

As part of the Asia Society's Arts and Museum Summit: Reimagining Museum Narratives in the 21st Century, November 17-19, 2021.

Register here

Cultural program

Ámà

4 and 7 November 2021

Ámà: 4 Days on Caring, Repairing and Healing, Gropius Bau, Berlin, 4-7 November 2021. 

The Gropius Bau is hosting a four-day programme of workshops, performances and conversations that focuses on diverse approaches to the fields of care, repair and healing. This event also serves as a prelude to an extensive thematic exhibition at the Gropius Bau in 2022. 

Brook Andrew is part of the curatorial team for the exhibition and during the November program will hold conversations with Francisco Godoy Vega, Pedro Wonaeamirri and Betty Muffler. He will also be in conversation with the curatorial team: Kader Attia, Natasha Ginwala, Clare Molloy, Dmitry Paranyushkin, Bárbara Rodríguez Muñoz, Stephanie Rosenthal, SERAFINE1369 and Magnus Elias Rosengarten.

Program and tickets here

Talk

Ketchup Session

29 September 2021

Ketchup Session: Brook Andrew & Mariana Castillo Deball hosted by Ivan Muñiz Reed

Wednesday, September 29, 11 am PDT | 1 pm CDT, KADIST

This installment of Ketchup Sessions brings together Brook Andrew and Mariana Castillo Deball. The two artists discuss a shared interest in historical objects and the role that our physical and material past play in the construction of our histories and identities. Brief presentations about current work and ideas is followed by an informal dialogue moderated by by curator Ivan Muñiz Reed.

Talk

Past & Present

22-24 September 2021

Past & Present - Unfolding Narratives in the Pacific, Université Le Havre Normandie, 22-24 September 2021.

Following a keynote by George Nuku to introduce the session “Story Telling and Contemporary Artists in/and the Museum”, Brook Andrew was in conversation with Roberta Colombo Dougoud, curator of Oceania collection at the Musée d’ethnographie de Genéve, about Brook’s 2017 intervention at the museum.

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

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)

Talk

Brook Andrew and Alexie Glass-Kantor | In Conversation

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

Symposia: RE-GARDER

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

Award

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

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.

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

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