Australian interdisciplinary artist Brook Andrew creates multilayered artworks that question the dominance of Western colonial narratives, deliberately locating Australia and Indigenous cultures at the centre of a global inquisition. Drawing inspiration from archival and vernacular objects, Andrew works with different communities — as well as public and private collections around the world — to reveal alternative histories that are hidden beneath the legacies of colonialism.

For the Adelaide//International, Andrew presents the premiere of Room B, an installation drawn from a body of work shown at the Musée d’ethnographie de Genève in 2017 – 2018, and encompassing his video SMASH IT, created whilst the artist was a 2017 Smithsonian Artist Research Fellow at the Smithsonian Institute, Washington. Within this immersive installation, the artist links different histories and peoples previously divided by the trope of ‘primitivism’ and the powerful gaze of the European colonial machine. In this way, Room B provides viewers new ways to see the world through reinterpreting history and reframing inherited experience.

A Samstag Museum of Art Adelaide//International exhibition presented for the 2019 Adelaide Festival.

2019 Adelaide//International catalogue essay by Samstag Museum of Art Director Erica Green.