Exhibitions

Curated by Angela Connor, MAPh Senior Curator

In 2026 the Museum of Australian Photography presents a major commission by Brook Andrew, one of Australia’s most influential and internationally recognised artists. Working across visual art, research and long-term collaboration, Andrew’s practice reveals and reimagines the legacies of power and representation that continue to shape how histories are produced, circulated and understood. His work brings the unseen into view, unsettling inherited narratives and proposing new ways of seeing the entanglement of historical structures with contemporary life. This practice is informed by Andrew’s perspectives as a Wiradjuri and Ngunnawal person, and by sustained engagement with archives, museums and global systems of display.

Over recent years, the Museum of Australian Photography has built one of the most significant collections of Andrew’s work in Australia. ROLLERCOASTER: winhangadurinya in motion brings this growing body of work into dialogue with a new major commission. Together, they offer an expansive view of a practice that continues to evolve through Andrew’s ongoing interrogation of interhuman and more-than-human conditions.

The exhibition title ROLLERCOASTER: winhangadurinya in motion signals both movement and method. Rollercoaster speaks to collage as a critical strategy – one that dissects, recombines and destabilises the increasingly globalised world we inhabit. Andrew’s collages move between eras marked by absence, slowness and analogue communication, and a present shaped by acceleration, ambivalence to the truth and proliferating images. They reflect the precarious balance between the desire for calm, continuity and care, and the instability produced by rapid change, political volatility and environmental uncertainty.

The Wiradjuri word winhangadurinya – often understood as meditation or deep reflective thinking – invites other ways of knowing time and history. It gestures towards stillness within motion, and towards forms of attention that resist linear progression or easy resolution. Across all museum spaces, Andrew’s exhibition unfolds as a site of contemplation, drawing the intimate and the political into close relation.

Andrew’s work has long engaged with the profound losses produced through colonial disruption – of cultures, languages, bodies and relationships – and with the narratives constructed to obscure, justify or protect the wealth generated by these processes. The exhibition asks how such histories continue to reverberate, and how their unresolved fallout is carried forward, even within a hyper-alert contemporary world propelled towards an uncertain future.

Key series anchor the exhibition. This Year, 2020 innovates the medium of collage to address a moment of global upheaval and historical reckoning. GABAN: House of Strange extends Andrew’s sustained interrogation of museums and colonial collecting practices; drawing on the Wiradjuri term gaban – meaning strange – it explores the unease, power and emotional charge embedded within institutional spaces. Across the exhibition, Andrew constructs a visual field in which history is continually reassembled. Viewers are invited to recognise the conditions through which meaning is produced, circulated and contested – and to remain attentive to what is held, what is obscured, and what is still in motion.

Image:
Brook ANDREW
This year, hold to madness… 2020
from the series This year
chromogenic print
159.0 x 129.0 cm
Museum of Australian Photography, City of Monash Collection
courtesy of the artist and Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris and Brussels; Ames Yavuz Gallery, Sydney, London and Singapore; and Tolarno Galleries, Melbourne