Curator: Brook Andrew
There is more going on in the latest Brook Andrew show, Taboo, than meets the eye. On the face of it, as a group show on a titillating topic, it continues the rhetorical impact of the ‘Sexy and Dangerous’ photographs that first brought Andrew to prominence in 1996.
Andrew has worked with ethnographic images in archives and museums throughout his career. He has also worked with the conventions of a post-colonial image-world in which ‘the look’ and ‘the gaze’ come styled by the practices of marketing.
Andrew is part of a change in Indigenous art toward an exploding of the definition. His transformation of his black and white Wiradjuri design through op-art wallpaper into a recognisable branding, appearing on clothes and buildings, is complete in the arrow installed on the outside wall of the renovated Museum of Contemporary Art.
His elaboration on themes of Indigenous identity in the wake of globalised media-images reached a pitch in the 2008-09 Theme Park, a show mimicking a museum and staged across several galleries at the AAMU (Museum of Contemporary Aboriginal Art) in Utrecht.
Taboo is a logical consequence of this, and also perhaps of Andrew’s conceptual art in general, turning from installation to curation. In the spirit of anthology, not a lot of the work is new, from which we can glean that the purpose of the show is not to reveal so much as to collect together, in a new context, diverse elements presented in a new light.
Like Theme Park, Taboo comes accompanied by copious collecting—photographs and images from the historical trajectory Andrew is following—and is elaborated in written pieces from artists and ethnographers in a catalogue