Brook Andrew announced as artistic director of Sydney Biennale as record visitation achieved

A contemporary artist who was born in Western Sydney and now exhibits around the world has been appointed artistic director for the next Sydney Biennale.

Brook Andrew at his exhibition, The Right to Offend is Sacred, at the National Gallery of Victoria last year. Picture: Wayne Taylor

A contemporary artist who was raised in Western Sydney and exhibits around the world has been announced as the artistic director for the next Sydney Biennale.

Brook Andrew is of the Wiradjuri Nation and has Celtic ancestry, and said his Biennale might be “a bit more earthy”.

The 48-year-old who lives between Sydney, Melbourne and London will take the reins of one of Sydney’s biggest public events which this year had record visitation of more than 850,000, according to Biennale CEO Jo-Anne Birnie-Danzker.

Andrew said his aim was to focus on “edge cultures” that are not the standard fare of large-scale contemporary art biennales.

Edge cultures were not necessarily indigenous cultures, Andrew said. They were successful and rich cultures, but were “a little bit hidden away or aren’t given as much exposure”.

Despite not being mainstream, edge cultures gave their participants “authentic experiences”.

“It’s about how that can be manoeuvred into the centre, which challenges the usually canon,” Andrew said.

“It’s more about looking at this region and the Pacific, looking at the complex ideas and societies that are very stable that have been around for thousands of years. But because they don’t fit neatly into a western idea of what art is, it’s always a bit of a struggle for people to understand.”

Andrew said he hopes to couple edge cultures with established artists whose ideas were also “a bit different”.

“I think there will be some art stars (in the 2020 Biennale) because they’re good artists and everyone wants a Biennale with some good artists,” he said.

“We all want to experience something really exciting. But it’s about how you position artists and objects and collections together, where everyone is singing in unison.

“It’s about my interest in creating more of a level playing field of how we engage with art.”

Artist Brook Andrew with his work Jumping Castle Memorial, 2010, on Cockatoo Island. The work was seen as part of that year’s Sydney Biennale. Picture: News Corp

Asked what he hoped visitors to the 2020 Sydney Biennale will take away with them, Andrew said he hoped they recognise themselves in the exhibits.

“I think one important aspect of something that I would like to see happen a lot more is where people actually do see themselves and are feeling a connection to it,” he said.

“That’s something I’ve always been passionate about.”

The Sydney Biennale was “another opportunity to do things that I love doing, and that is working with artists, working with space, developing ideas for the public to come and share and to also challenge themselves”.

Brook Andrew has a long and distinguished exhibition history beginning in 1992 at the Casula Powerhouse in Liverpool. He went on to exhibit widely at an international level.

Andrew received a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship in 2017.

He is now using an Australian Research Council grant to study Australian trauma sites and how they have been memorialised internationally.

He and his team have organised an international forum to take place next week in Melbourne. Among other tasks, the forum will consider a site or building to house the repatriated remains of indigenous people from Australia which are still in overseas collections.

Delegates to the forum will include architects, historians, members of the Arapaho nation in the US and experts connected to the new Cambodian institution being built to house the largest archive of genocide-related documents in Southeast Asia. The architect is Zaha Hadid.

Andrew has interviewed Daniel Libeskind in New York, who designed the Jewish Museum in Berlin, and Peter Eisenman the architect who worked on the memorial to the murdered Jews in Berlin.

Andrew hopes the forum will culminate in the building of an Australian repatriation museum for human remains.

In the catalogue for his 2017 exhibition, The Right To Offend Is Sacred, at the National Gallery of Victoria, Andrew wrote: “I dedicate this exhibition to those who wish to see clearly the histories and legacies of the often unseen. To the wealth of hidden memories, treasures, bodies and systems that stay in dark places.”