Artist Brook Andrew has long been interested in what he calls "sites of memory", particularly memorials to traumatic events such as battles as massacres.
Artist Brook Andrew will be director of the next Sydney Biennale.
Nearing the end of a three-year residency in Berlin, Andrew has been examining how well World War II is memorialised in Germany, while considering why there are so few comparable Australian memorials marking the conflicts between white settlers and Indigenous Australians between 1788 and the 1930s.
"Why do Australians visit the killing fields of Cambodia or go to Birkenau and Auschwitz and those sites of trauma? Why do they go to Gallipoli?" says Andrew.
"It's for the same reasons that I believe they should be visiting sites in Australia, and it shouldn't be about guilt or fear. If we look at basic, historical facts there is nothing to fear."
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Andrew has just been appointed artistic director of the 22nd Biennale of Sydney and it is big questions such as these that he wants to tackle in his 2020 program.
A highly respected contemporary artist who has exhibited widely in Australia and overseas as well as last year winning the Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship, Andrew is particularly interested in exposing the stories from cultures that are often drowned out by the mainstream.
"I'm very interested in alternative narratives," he says. "I really enjoy process and collaboration and digging deep into an idea or exposing alternative narratives and stories that are not so dominant."
Organisers of the 21st Biennale, directed by Mami Kataoka, say the event, which has just closed, has been the most successful in its 45-year history. More than 850,000 people attended sites from Carriageworks to Cockatoo Island, which is an increase of more than $200,000 over 2016.
Andrew, who is of Wiradjuri and Celtic ancestry, was appointed to the prestigious role after three months of discussions with the Biennale board about his ideas.
Even so, he admits, he is only just at the beginning of his Biennale "journey", which will take shape after many discussions with other artists that will range from major institutions to grassroots groups.
"I do have an ideology for this which is very specific but kind of fluffy around the edges," he says. "I'm excited by the things I don't know. And there's a lot I don't know. I think the most exciting thing about this gig is going to places within Australia and overseas and seeing what people are doing."
Nick Galvin is a journalist with The Sydney Morning Herald
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