The Eighth Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art

BROOK ANDREW Australia b.1970 Wiradjuri people Installation view, Ancestral Worship 2010 Commissioned for ‘21st Century: Art in the First Decade’, Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, 2010 / Image courtesy: The artist The soft, purple haze of jacaranda flowers, redolent with the scent and growing optimism of a Brisbane afternoon in late spring, forms the centrepiece of R Godfrey Rivers’s Under the jacaranda 1903. One of the earliest acquired and most popular works in the Queensland Art Gallery Collection, this idyll to a sun-filled, domesticated Brisbane landscape is almost permanently on display. In the months when Brisbane is flush with the purple of her jacaranda-lined streets and parks, Rivers’s work is mysteriously adorned with almost ceremonial offerings of soft, fresh petals. In spring 2015, leading up to APT8, Under the jacaranda was temporarily removed from display, along with its companion works in the Australian galleries. Over the richly coloured walls referencing nineteenth- and early twentieth-century domestic interiors were painted chevron- shaped designs customarily found in ceremonies marking the skin of members of the Wiradjuri people of the Bathurst area of central New South Wales. Over this design, the Collection works were rehung, reinstating the institutional narrative of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Australian art and history. This new offering, instigated by Wiradjuri artist Brook Andrew, initiates a conversation through time and space, between settler and Indigenous cultures, about the experience and effects of their encounters. Like the annual scattering of soft petals at the foot of Rivers’s painting, Andrew’s work, with its evocation of the body, performance and land, marks and honours a profound sense of connection to place. By positioning the chevron designs marked on the skin of his people over the internal walls of one of the institutions in which this country’s history is enacted and re-enacted, Andrew asserts the ongoing presence of an Aboriginal body in this country’s foundation narratives. The wall becomes the ground over which narratives about the Australian landscape, culture and people have been established. 80—81 WHERE DOWE COME FROM? WHAT ARE WE? WHERE ARE WE GOING?