This year, missing witness…

2020 - Photography (Photography)

159 x 129 cm

Brook Andrew

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This year: missing witness by Brook Andrew consists of a multi-layered collage of photographs. The work features newspaper cut-outs of the phrases: “This year: be prepared…” and “missing witness” overlaid onto a disaster scene, upon a worn-up manuscript. Pulled from The New York Times , the image is of a destroyed temple on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, that has increasingly experienced natural disasters due to climate change. The book cover is an original edition of engravings from the complete works of British satirist William Hogarth (c. 1860). Created during the 2020 pandemic, Andrew’s work points to a series of issues that have moved communities across the world: a global pandemic, climate change, religious and political control, and the Black, Indigenous, and Trans Lives Matter movements internationally. The struggles for more awareness of environmental destruction, human rights, and sovereignty have been discussed for generations. The work’s juxtaposition of historical and contemporary materials underlines the long-term state and urgency of these issues, as well as the anxieties they produce. Contrasting the popular with the academic, the work reveals the ways in which the media and visual culture continue to nurture obsessions with capital, race, and catastrophe, and influencing modes of interpretation that swing from hope and joy to ignorance and despair.

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Brook Andrew is a Wiradjuri and Ngunnawal Aboriginal Australian artist and scholar whose interdisciplinary practice examines hegemonic narratives relating to colonialism and modernism. Questioning the social and cultural limitations imposed by power structures, historical amnesia, stereotyping, and complicity, Andrew centers Indigenous perspective in his artworks, museum interventions, and curatorial projects. His dynamic projects uncover suppressed histories and offer alternative interpretations of the legacies of colonialism.

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Colors:

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• medium.n.01
• capitalism.n.01
• environment.n.01
• oppression.n.01
• violence.n.01
• politics.n.01
• history.n.01