Brook Andrew works across photography, installation, moving image, performance and museum interventions, frequently questioning the systems through which historical images and objects are collected and interpreted. His practice is informed by Wiradjuri and Ngunnawal cultural perspectives as well as sustained engagement with archives, colonial histories and the politics of visibility.
What interests me is the idea that an archive is never simply a storage room.
Someone decided what deserved to be collected. Someone wrote the label. Someone chose which photograph represented a person, culture or event. Those decisions can survive long enough that we begin treating them as neutral facts.
Andrew’s work often turns attention back onto those structures.
That changes the position of the viewer. Instead of only asking, “What does this historical image show?”, another question appears: “Who constructed the way I am seeing it?”
Museums traditionally ask objects to explain history. Artists can reverse the relationship and ask the museum itself to explain how it has been producing history all along.