The work of Brook Andrew asks how history is made visible, who is given authority to tell it, and what happens when established narratives are reconsidered.
A Wiradjuri artist, curator, writer, and researcher, Andrew has developed an interdisciplinary practice spanning photography, sculpture, installation, video, printmaking, public art, and institutional intervention.
His work frequently draws on archives, museum collections, ethnographic photography, and Wiradjuri language. Rather than treating these materials as fixed records of the past, Brook Andrew repositions them, placing familiar images and objects into new contexts and questioning the systems that have historically determined how First Nations peoples and cultures are represented.
This approach has made him an important figure in contemporary First Nations art and in wider conversations around museums, colonial histories, memory, and cultural authority.
Who is Brook Andrew?
Brook Andrew was born in 1970 in Sydney and is of Wiradjuri and Celtic ancestry. The current Art Leven profile records his language as Wiradjuri and his long association with contemporary art since the mid-1990s.
His practice does not sit neatly within a single medium.
Photography may be combined with neon.
Archival images can appear within large installations.
Sculpture, video, text, sound, and exhibition design can operate together.
At other times, Andrew works directly with the collections and structures of museums themselves.
The connecting thread is not a particular material or technique, but a sustained interest in the way history, power, identity, and memory are constructed.
Brook Andrew and the archive
The archive is one of the most important recurring elements in Brook Andrew’s practice.
Museums, libraries, photographic collections, and anthropological archives contain vast numbers of objects and images gathered during periods of colonial expansion. These collections have often been presented as neutral repositories of information.
Andrew’s work questions that neutrality.
Who made the photograph?
Who collected the object?
How was it classified?
Whose description became the official record?
And whose perspective was absent?
By returning to archival material and placing it within contemporary artworks, Andrew can shift the authority of the original image.
The archive becomes something to examine rather than simply accept.
This research-led approach has included work with major international museum collections, including the Smithsonian Institution, Musée du quai Branly, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, and Pitt Rivers Museum.
Reframing colonial photography
Photography has played a particularly significant role in Brook Andrew’s career.
Historical photographs of First Nations people were frequently produced within colonial systems that classified their subjects according to ideas of race, anthropology, and difference.
Andrew has repeatedly returned to this material.
By enlarging photographs, combining them with graphic patterns or language, altering their context, or removing them from the institutional frameworks in which they were originally presented, he changes the relationship between image and viewer.
The person in an archival photograph is no longer simply an object of historical observation.
The image begins to expose the assumptions of the person who made, collected, classified, or displayed it.
One of Andrew’s best-known works, Sexy and Dangerous from 1996, employs an archival portrait together with bold graphic elements and text. The work has become closely associated with his wider examination of colonial representations of the First Nations body.
Wiradjuri language in Brook Andrew’s art
Language is another important element of Brook Andrew’s practice.
Wiradjuri words and phrases have appeared within his work since the 1990s, sometimes alongside archival photographs or incorporated through neon, text, and installation.
The use of Wiradjuri language does more than add information to an artwork.
It can change who is expected to understand the work immediately.
Much institutional and colonial material historically positioned English as the language through which First Nations people were described, catalogued, and interpreted.
Andrew reverses that relationship.
Wiradjuri language can occupy the centre of the work, while viewers unfamiliar with it encounter the limits of their own knowledge.
The Chartwell Project identifies Ngajuu Ngaay Nginduugirr (I see you) from 1998 as an early example of Andrew combining photographic material with Wiradjuri language.
This relationship between language, visibility, and authority has continued throughout his practice.
Patterns, surfaces, and visual disruption
Brook Andrew’s work is often visually striking before its historical or political references become apparent.
Repeated black-and-white patterns have become particularly recognisable within his practice.
These graphic surfaces can cover walls, sculptures, installations, and architectural spaces. They create visual movement and can make an exhibition environment feel unstable or difficult to read at first glance.
That disruption is useful.
Museums typically organise objects through systems intended to make them understandable. Labels identify them. Cases contain them. Categories establish their relationships.
Andrew frequently interrupts this visual order.
A gallery wall can become active rather than neutral.
An archival object may be surrounded by unexpected colour or pattern.
Historical material can sit beside contemporary work without the hierarchy normally imposed by chronology or institutional classification.
The viewer is encouraged to reconsider not only the objects on display, but the system used to display them.
Museums as a subject of Brook Andrew’s work
For Brook Andrew, the museum is not merely a place where art is exhibited.
It can itself become the subject.
His museum interventions examine how cultural institutions collect, preserve, classify, and present knowledge.
This has led Andrew to work directly with museum archives and collections internationally.
In Ahy-kon-uh-klas-tik, created at the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven in 2017, Andrew worked with the museum’s archive and collection to construct an alternative historical framework. At the Musée d’ethnographie de Genève, his Room A project similarly reconsidered how ethnographic collections could be encountered.
These projects are part of a broader shift within museums internationally.
Institutions are increasingly examining the colonial histories behind their collections, including questions of acquisition, attribution, representation, and restitution.
Andrew has been working with these questions for decades.
The Right to Offend is Sacred
A major survey of Brook Andrew’s career, The Right to Offend is Sacred, was presented at the National Gallery of Victoria in 2017.
The exhibition brought together approximately 25 years of his practice and demonstrated the breadth of his approach across photography, sculpture, neon, installation, archival research, and institutional critique.
The title captures an important element within Andrew’s work.
His practice often creates uncomfortable encounters with history.
Rather than simplifying complex issues into a single argument, the work can place contradictory images, objects, and narratives together.
This creates space for questions rather than presenting history as settled.
Brook Andrew and the Biennale of Sydney
Brook Andrew’s influence extends beyond his own studio practice.
He was Artistic Director of NIRIN, the 22nd Biennale of Sydney, presented in 2020.
The appointment made him the first First Nations artistic director of the Biennale of Sydney.
NIRIN placed First Nations and artist-led perspectives at the centre of the exhibition and brought together artists from many parts of the world.
Andrew’s curatorial practice therefore develops many of the same concerns present in his artwork.
Whose knowledge is prioritised?
Who controls cultural narratives?
How can institutions create space for different ways of understanding the world?
These questions become curatorial as well as artistic.
Research as artistic practice
Research is fundamental to Brook Andrew’s work.
He has undertaken projects and residencies at institutions including the Smithsonian Institution and Musée du quai Branly and completed a DPhil at the Ruskin School of Art at the University of Oxford, drawing on the collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum.
This research does not sit separately from his art.
Documents, photographs, historical records, museum classifications, and conversations with communities can become material from which artworks develop.
As a result, the distinction between artist, researcher, curator, and institutional critic is often deliberately unclear.
Andrew moves between these roles because the questions he examines extend beyond the production of individual objects.
They concern the systems surrounding those objects.
Contemporary institutional leadership
Brook Andrew continues to work across art, research, and institutional practice.
Current institutional biographies identify him as Director of Reimagining Museums and Collections at the University of Melbourne, alongside his continuing work as an artist and researcher.
This position reflects the trajectory of a practice that has long examined museums from both inside and outside their structures.
Rather than treating institutional critique as opposition to museums, Andrew’s work often asks how such institutions might operate differently.
How can collections be reinterpreted?
How can communities participate in decisions about cultural material?
How might First Nations knowledge systems alter the assumptions on which museums were built?
These questions remain central to his contemporary practice.
Looking at a Brook Andrew artwork
A Brook Andrew work often rewards looking twice.
The first encounter may be highly visual.
Strong pattern.
Neon light.
Large photographic imagery.
Reflective surfaces.
Bold architectural structures.
But the visual impact often leads into another layer of meaning.
An image may come from a colonial archive.
A word may be Wiradjuri.
An apparently decorative pattern may alter the relationship between viewer, photograph, and exhibition space.
An object might carry a different meaning depending on whether it is understood as art, ethnographic material, evidence, or cultural property.
Andrew deliberately destabilises these categories.
The work asks the viewer to consider not only what they are looking at, but how they have learned to look.
The significance of Brook Andrew
Brook Andrew’s practice has developed across more than three decades of major change in the way First Nations art, colonial collections, and institutional histories are discussed.
His work has been part of that change.
By working with archival photography, Wiradjuri language, museum collections, installation, and curatorial practice, he draws attention to the structures through which history becomes authoritative.
Yet his practice is not concerned simply with identifying problems in the past.
It also asks how those histories might be approached differently.
Archives can be reopened.
Images can be reframed.
Languages can return to institutional spaces.
Objects can acquire new relationships.
And established narratives can be reconsidered.
For Brook Andrew, history is not a closed record.
It remains something that can be examined, challenged, and rewritten.
Discover Brook Andrew at Art Leven
Art Leven (formerly Cooee Art) has handled works by Brook Andrew across his contemporary practice.
Explore available and previously handled artworks, biographical information, exhibitions, and further details on the Brook Andrew artist profile. The existing profile provides additional context on works including Sexy and Dangerous, his major exhibitions, and his wider career.