Dr Brook Andrew

Brook Andrew is an interdisciplinary artist who examines dominant narratives, often relating to colonialism from a Wiradjuri/Celtic Australian perspective. Through his museum and archival research, interventions and curatorial projects, he aims to make forgotten stories visible and offer alternative choices for interpreting history in the world today. Apart from drawing inspiration from vernacular objects and the archive, he travels internationally to work with communities and various private and public collections. Brook completed a DPhil at the Ruskin School of Art, Oxford, drawing on the collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum as part of his research, and was co-supervised by Dr Christopher Morton.

From 2016 to 2018, Brook was chief investigator of an international comparative three-year Federal Government Australian Research Council project Representation, Remembrance and the Memorial, which responded to the repeated high-level calls for a national memorial to Aboriginal loss and the frontier wars.  In 2017, Brook was a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellow at the Smithsonian Institute, Washington; and artist in residence at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin from July 2017 to June 2018.

In 2017, Brook created the installation Ahy-kon-uh-klas-tik, an interrogation of the Van Abbemuseum archives and art collection in Holland, which imagined a different world timeline. The same year, he created Room A, a curatorial and art intervention into the collection of the Musée d’ethnographie de Genève in Switzerland, and his 25-year reflection on his practice The Right to Offend is Sacred opened at the National Gallery of Victoria, Australia. Brook was Artistic Director of the 22nd Biennale of Sydney in 2020.