Brook Andrew Picked as Artistic Director of the 2020 Biennale of Sydney

Artist Brook Andrew has been appointed artistic director of the 22nd Biennale of Sydney, which will take place in the Australian city in 2020.

Andrew’s work, which examines colonialism and alternative historical narratives, has been exhibited at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid, the Musée d’ethnographie de Genève in Geneva, the Musée du quai Branly in Paris, and the National Gallery of Victoria in Australia, among others.

The artist was the 2017 recipient of the Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship during which he focused on the Frontier Wars of the U.S. and Australia. Recently, he completed a yearlong Australia Council International Residency at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin where he explored memory sites in Germany. Andrew is currently finishing a three-year-long Australian Research Council Grant.

“As artistic director, I am interested in shining a light on the active, stable and rich pre-existing collaborations and connectivity of Indigenous and Edge cultures,” Andrew said in a statement. “I aim to work together with artists, collectives and communities, from Australia and around the globe, to reconfigure the world as we see it and reveal rich local and global rhizomes and unique individual cultural expressions in one place.”

Andrew was selected for the position by a search committee that included Sook-Kyung Lee, senior research curator at the Tate Research Centre, Suhanya Raffel, executive director of M+ in Hong Kong, and Aaron Seeto, director of the MACAN Museum in Jakarta. The Biennale of Sydney also consulted with Exhibition Partners Art Gallery of New South Wales, Artspace, Carriageworks, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia.

Kate Mills, the chairman of the Biennale of Sydney, said in a statement, “As we collectively face an increasingly complex future, we are proud to celebrate the substantive, transformative creative practice of Brook Andrew as he imagines alternative visions for the future.”

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