‘Vivid Memories. An Aboriginal Art History’, Musée d’Aquitaine, Bordeaux.

Vivid Memories. An Aboriginal Art History
15 Oct 2013 – 30 April 2014

The scientific committee of the exhibition is composed of Barbara Glowczewski, Ian Mc Lean, Jessica de Largy Heally, Lyndon Ormond-Parker and Arnaud Morvan.

Brook Andrew will create 2 new immersive installations for Vivid Memories. An Aboriginal Art History. The first is an immersive patterned room for Clown, and a new installation Trophés oubliés that utilises traditional museum cabinets and the collections of the Musée d’Aquitaine.

Clown I, 2008
Solo exhibition. Installation view
Aboriginal Art Museum, Utrecht, Holland, 2008

Trophés oubliés

The four vitrines and velvet chairs in the foyer of the Musée d’Aquitaine is a site-specific art installation by Australian artist Brook Andrew. Brook Andrew is also exhibiting Clown Box in Vivid Memories currently on exhibition at the museum.

For Trophés oubliés (The forgotten trophies) Brook Andrew has juxtaposed French cartoon books with objects from the Musee d’Aquitaine collections. This juxtaposition reflects his interests in highlighting ethnographic and colonial stories often created by European museums surrounding the objects collected from colonised peoples and held as trophies of conquest and curiosity. At times, the stories are a factual representation, comical or incorrect for indigenous peoples as the objects often loose their power or story when placed within a museum. Brook Andrew further subverts this practice of display by creating new and sometimes absurdist juxtapositions like a hat on a clay object with a classical Roman-French sculpture climbing out of a plastic storage case. These ‘found’ objects from the museums collection are often exhibited as is or ad-hoc to highlight the often inconsequential and bizarre presentation of objects displayed without original context.

Brook Andrew enables the objects to speak outside of their usual classification to create a new semiotics that enable different stories to emerge. This action supports a personal discovery not bound by museological classification. Hence, this new reading of the objects becomes a personal exploration with new possibilities, stories, histories and implications. Some may read the juxtaposition as revealing humorous, sexual, voyeuristic or violent meanings, or new and unknown histories not often expressed in museum display. Some might see the placement as absurd and either dismiss or be relieved by the abstraction, where the object is reduced to a ready-made object free of classification, and in this case, freed from the museum itself.

The cartoon books with titles like ‘les oubliés’ (the forgotten) are placed inside the vitrines and with the museums red velvet chairs highlighting the ‘theatre’ of exploration and object obsessions in acquiring trophies and curiosities. This ‘theatre’ is expressed through the often-intense subjects in the comic books, questioning the validity of truth and imagination of each object and the practice of collecting and colonisation itself.