Brook Andrew’s ROLLERCOASTER: winhangadurinya in motion begins with a decision. Look right and there’s You’ve Always Wanted to Be Black, a neon declaration from 2006, beside the sprawling constellation of This Year—large chromogenic prints set against a high-contrast chevron wall alongside sculptural works built from paper, wood, neon and acrylic. Look left and you encounter the curatorial introduction, the rare postcards of Men, the monumental sweep of buunji nginduugir AMERICA, and, further into the gallery, the illuminated structure of Harvest. Beyond it, the exhibition continues.
Most exhibitions establish hierarchy within seconds. A central work anchors the entrance, a dominant wall directs the eye, and the visitor is quietly told where to begin. ROLLERCOASTER: winhangadurinya in motion, curated by Angela Connor, refuses that certainty. Before anything can be understood, a choice has already been made.
Andrew, who is Wiradjuri and Ngunnawal, has spent more than three decades examining not simply what archives contain but who decides what an archive is. Images do not merely survive; they are selected, catalogued, preserved and given authority. The exhibition turns that process back on itself. Where you begin becomes part of what you eventually understand.
The title binds together two different experiences of time. “Rollercoaster” evokes acceleration, momentum and the sensation of being carried along a predetermined path. Winhangadurinya, a Wiradjuri word, suggests something altogether slower: to know, remember and think deeply. Rather than moving towards resolution, it asks for sustained attention. Throughout the exhibition these two conditions exist together—the urgency of movement and the patience of reflection.
Connor’s installation does not introduce Andrew’s work so much as immerse the visitor within its central problem. Orientation is never fully secured. Every decision about where to stand or where to look first becomes part of the exhibition’s argument about the ways images, histories and institutions organise our understanding of the world.
Choreographing the Museum
The success of ROLLERCOASTER: winhangadurinya in motion depends as much on Angela Connor’s installation as it does on Brook Andrew’s work. Rather than organising the exhibition chronologically or separating bodies of work into discrete series, Connor constructs a sequence that continually folds back on itself. Works produced more than two decades apart occupy the same visual field. Neon spills across adjoining galleries. Monumental photographic installations sit beside intimate archival material. Nothing is allowed to settle into an isolated statement.
Movement becomes the exhibition’s organising principle. Visitors circulate, retrace their steps and repeatedly encounter works from different positions. A piece initially glimpsed across the gallery later appears at eye level. A neon work first encountered in peripheral vision gradually becomes the destination toward which the visitor has unknowingly been moving. The exhibition continually rearranges itself through the viewer’s movement, making looking an active process rather than a passive one.
This approach resists one of the enduring conventions of photography exhibitions, where individual bodies of work are separated into clearly defined units with a beginning and an end. Connor deliberately dissolves those boundaries. Relationships between works are not announced through chronology or extensive interpretation but emerge through proximity, repetition and contrast. Connections remain provisional rather than fixed, encouraging visitors to construct their own pathways through the exhibition.
The installation itself is visually assertive. The monumental This Year prints occupy a striking black-and-white chevron wall whose geometry competes with the images rather than quietly supporting them. Smaller sculptural works project from the surface, interrupting the expectation that photographs exist only as flat objects on a wall. Elsewhere, coloured partitions redirect movement, neon reflections spill onto surrounding surfaces, and carefully framed sightlines reveal works in distant galleries before they are physically encountered. The architecture becomes an active participant in the exhibition rather than a neutral container for it.
Connor also understands the importance of rhythm. Dense constellations of photographs, sculptural objects, historical material and neon are followed by quieter passages in which individual works regain their own scale and presence. The exhibition expands and contracts as visitors move through it, alternating between visual compression and moments of release. That shifting pace prevents the installation from becoming either visually overwhelming or overly didactic.
The strategy is not without risk. In the exhibition’s most compressed moments, several works compete simultaneously for attention, and the eye cannot always separate them immediately. Yet that tension proves productive rather than distracting. It mirrors Andrew’s sustained examination of how meaning emerges through relationships between images rather than from isolated objects.
Connor’s installation ultimately does more than display Andrew’s work. It adopts the same underlying logic. Every exhibition is an act of selection, organisation and interpretation, shaping not only what is seen but how it is seen. By making those structures visible, the installation extends Andrew’s investigation of archives, institutions and photographic representation into the architecture of the exhibition itself.
Fragments and Fields
Produced in response to the intersecting crises of 2020—climate catastrophe, political unrest and the social rupture of the COVID-19 pandemic—This Year absorbs those conditions rather than illustrating them, folding them into a visual language already structured by fracture, displacement and interruption.
Andrew begins with torn pages from an original edition of engravings by William Hogarth. These are not neutral historical documents. Hogarth’s images are themselves carefully organised through satire, social hierarchy and staged narrative. Once torn apart and removed from their original sequence, they lose even that provisional coherence. They become fragments—dislodged, partial and stripped of their original authority.
Those fragments are brought into dialogue with contemporary imagery, typography and graphic interventions, producing dense compositions that resist linear reading. The torn page remains visible, but its authority has been displaced. Rather than functioning as an illustration of history, it becomes one element within a broader visual structure in which competing systems of representation occupy the same surface.
Across works such as This year, activist listening, This year, ambition, This year, colour, race and empire, This year, hold to madness and This year, historic plight, historical reference, media language and contemporary image-making occupy the same pictorial space without resolving into a unified narrative. The eye moves laterally across the surface, tracing provisional relationships between images, words and fragments instead of settling on a single point of meaning. Each return reveals a different pathway through the work, but never a definitive one.
The chromogenic prints operate at a scale that initially promises clarity. From a distance they appear remarkably coherent; close inspection unsettles that impression. Details emerge only to disappear into another network of associations, and visual hierarchies continually shift as attention moves across the image. Looking becomes an active process of negotiation rather than recognition.
The sculptural works extend that negotiation into three dimensions. Constructed from paper, wood, neon and acrylic, they project from the wall, disrupting the assumption that photographic meaning resides solely within a flat image. Their physical presence interrupts the rhythm established by the surrounding prints, forcing the viewer to move repeatedly between image, object and architectural space.
Installed against the exhibition’s striking chevron wall, the series acquires another level of visual complexity. Rather than receding into the background, the geometry competes with the photographs, producing moments in which image and installation press against one another. The result is not confusion but sustained visual pressure. Every work contains more than can be grasped in a single encounter, rewarding prolonged attention without ever collapsing into a single, settled reading.
Brook Andrew’s Archive: What the Museum Keeps
Harvest is built from Victorian redgum, carbonised timber, glass and brass, recalling the historical Wunderkammer—the cabinet of curiosities—while rejecting the authority such cabinets once claimed. Rather than presenting a world ordered through classification, Andrew constructs an archive that refuses certainty from the outset.
Inside, he assembles material drawn from his own collection: ethnographic objects, colonial publications, photographs, books and documents gathered over decades. Among them are Aboriginal artefacts, missionary newspapers, historical prints and an 1854 letter describing a massacre of Aboriginal people in Victoria’s Western District. None of these materials is privileged above another. They are neither arranged chronologically nor organised into a single historical account. Instead, they occupy the same physical space, held together only by the cabinet that contains them.
The letter is especially telling because Andrew refuses to isolate it as the exhibition’s moral centre. It is encountered among other objects that carry their own histories of collection, circulation and institutional preservation. Its significance emerges through proximity rather than emphasis. Rather than standing outside the archive as evidence against it, the document remains embedded within the very structures that collected, classified and transmitted it.
The cabinet determines how every object is encountered. Glass reflects as much as it reveals. Brass catches the light. Dark timber absorbs it. As visitors move around the work, reflections shift across the surface, revealing one object while obscuring another. No single position offers a complete view. Looking becomes a physical negotiation between transparency and obstruction, presence and concealment.
Unlike the conventional museum vitrine, which attempts to disappear so that objects can be seen with apparent neutrality, Harvest insists on its own presence. The cabinet continually reminds the viewer that every archive is mediated by the structures that contain it. Display is never neutral. The architecture of preservation shapes the meaning of what survives.
Andrew does not dismantle the museum cabinet. He turns it back on itself. Instead of guaranteeing knowledge, Harvest exposes how knowledge has always been organised through acts of collection, selection and display. The work asks the viewer to recognise that archives do not simply preserve history; they also determine how history becomes visible in the first place.
Brook Andrew and Language as Gesture
KILL PRIMITIVISM is one of the exhibition’s most direct interventions. Consisting solely of a red neon phrase mounted high on a black wall, it announces itself before the visitor reaches it. The work is encountered first as light, then as language. Its saturated glow spreads across the surrounding architecture, giving the words a presence that extends beyond the illuminated tubing.
Andrew confronts the colonial language through which Indigenous peoples were historically classified and represented within anthropology, museum collections and modern art. The term “primitivism”, long associated with racial hierarchy and cultural othering, is removed from its historical contexts and presented without explanation or qualification. Rather than reclaiming the word, Andrew exposes it, allowing its violence and persistence to register through its stark public display.
The choice of neon is integral to the work’s force. Associated with commercial signage and the visual language of the street, the medium is designed to command immediate attention. Andrew redirects that familiarity towards institutional critique. The glowing words borrow the authority of public signage while turning it against the systems of representation that produced and sustained colonial ways of seeing.
Mounted above eye level, KILL PRIMITIVISM functions as more than an individual object within the exhibition. It establishes a visual presence that extends across the gallery, repeatedly returning to the viewer’s field of vision. Its directness contrasts sharply with the complexity of the surrounding works. Where Andrew’s photographs, archives and installations ask for prolonged looking, the neon confronts immediately. That contrast gives the work much of its power. It speaks in the imperative, but leaves its implications to unfold through everything that follows.
Duration and Dispersal
Across GABAN: House of Strange, SMASH IT and De Anima, Andrew shifts the exhibition from the materially constructed image towards installation, performance and moving image. The questions introduced through photography, collage and archival intervention are no longer contained within a single surface. Instead, they unfold across space, duration and embodied experience. Looking becomes inseparable from movement, sound and time.
Developed from Andrew’s theatre script GABAN and realised in collaboration with Black, Indigenous and queer communities of diaspora, GABAN: House of Strange extends the artist’s longstanding engagement with museums, archives and displaced cultural materials. Its title derives from the Wiradjuri word gaban, meaning “strange”, a term that speaks not to cultural difference but to the dislocation produced through colonial systems of collecting, classification and display. Portraits and staged scenes are inspired by objects Andrew encountered during years of research in ethnographic collections, yet they refuse the detached authority of the museum vitrine. Instead, cultural presences are reanimated through performance, gesture and contemporary portraiture, carrying memory, trauma and ancestral presence into the present.
Installed throughout the gallery are monumental works such as Public Revenge, Procession and Fund Raiser, together with the GABAN: House of Strange portrait series, including Bunda-nha (photo), Guulany (tree), Winha-nga-nha (memory), Ngayamaldhaany (judge), Dhulu-ga-rra (guilt), Muganha (evidence) and Gudhingan/Walanbangan (guide/crown). Printed on metallic foil and Belgian linen, these works possess a shifting surface that changes with the available light. Images reveal themselves gradually rather than all at once, reinforcing Andrew’s rejection of fixed ways of seeing. Visitors continually reposition themselves before the works, discovering that perception itself becomes part of the installation’s subject.
The accompanying video documentation of the live performance GABAN, presented in the Grand Courts of the Art Gallery of New South Wales during the opening celebrations of the Sydney Modern Project in 2022, further expands the project beyond the gallery wall. Performed by an international collective of artists working across Black, Indigenous and LGBTQ+BIPOC communities, the work demonstrates that GABAN is not simply an installation but an evolving collaborative practice in which theatre, photography, moving image and performance remain inseparable.
SMASH IT approaches these concerns through montage rather than installation. Drawing together found footage of the destruction and defacement of monuments, historical postcards, ethnographic photographs and vintage film material sourced from Andrew’s own archive and the Smithsonian Institution, the work moves rapidly across historical and contemporary imagery without allowing it to stabilise into a single historical account. Interviews with First Nations cultural figures including Marcia Langton, Wesley Enoch, Lyndon Ormond-Parker and Maxine Briggs introduce another layer of reflection, while excerpts from Andrew’s earlier work The Pledge repeatedly interrupt the flow. Rather than illustrating a political argument, SMASH IT demonstrates how colonial narratives continue to circulate through museums, media and public memory, collapsing temporal boundaries in the process.
If SMASH IT accelerates the image, De Anima slows it without restoring certainty. Taking its title from Aristotle’s philosophical text on the soul, the single-channel work unfolds over fifteen minutes through a sustained dialogue between contemporary performance and historical moving-image material. Performances by Mama Alto and Justin Shoulder are interwoven with early cinema, documentary archives and found footage depicting war, ritual, spectacle, desire and catastrophe. Theodore Wohng’s immersive soundtrack binds these disparate elements into a continuous sensory experience while resisting narrative closure. Past and present remain inseparable, not because they have been merged into a single history, but because Andrew continually reveals how one persists within the other.
Taken together, these works mark a decisive shift in the exhibition. Earlier galleries ask how photographs, archives and museum collections produce historical knowledge. Here Andrew extends that enquiry into performance, cinema and duration. Images are no longer encountered as stable objects but as unfolding events whose meanings emerge gradually through movement, memory and repeated encounter. The exhibition slows the viewer down, insisting that understanding cannot be separated from the time spent looking.
Interrupted Histories
Transitions returns to historical imagery, though it refuses to treat that imagery as stable historical evidence. The installation brings together Andrew’s own works, historical prints, neon and archival imagery drawn from Australia, North America and Africa, extending his long-standing investigation into museums, colonial representation and the circulation of images through institutional culture.
The installation begins with existing prints, among them J. J. Crew’s An explorer’s camp (c.1874) and engravings by John Heaviside Clark, including The Dance and Smoking out the Opossum. These nineteenth-century images once functioned as instruments of observation, documenting exploration, ethnographic encounter and colonial expansion through the apparent authority of illustration. Andrew does not remove that history; he interrupts it. Gestural oil-stick markings and geometric forms derived from Wiradjuri carving traditions connected to his mother’s Country cut across the surfaces, selectively obscuring and revealing the original imagery.
These interventions are not decorative additions. They alter the conditions under which the historical images can be read. Figures remain visible but lose their authority as the organising centre of the composition. Gestures persist, landscapes survive and scenes of colonial observation can still be recognised, yet each image now oscillates between revelation and concealment. The historical print is neither preserved intact nor erased. Instead, it becomes the site of an active negotiation between inherited visual systems and contemporary Indigenous intervention.
Installed along a sweeping curved wall divided diagonally between black and yellow, the works acquire another level of complexity through Connor’s exhibition design. The architectural intervention prevents the images from settling into a conventional chronological sequence. Vertical neon elements, their exposed wiring intentionally visible, cast coloured light across both the prints and the gallery walls, subtly altering tonal relationships as visitors move through the space. Rather than illuminating the works neutrally, the neon becomes another layer through which they are encountered.
The sequence of transitions works—transitions 3, 4, 5, 7, 8 and 9—is punctuated by earlier works from Andrew’s practice, including Miriam (2003), Even a failing mind feels the tug of history (2009), untitled (2015) and guulany III (solar) (2023). Their inclusion broadens the installation beyond a single body of work, demonstrating the continuity of Andrew’s engagement with photography, printmaking, memory and Indigenous knowledge across more than two decades. Rather than functioning as retrospective inserts, these works deepen the dialogue between historical image-making and contemporary intervention.
What emerges is not a revision of colonial imagery but a reconsideration of how such imagery continues to circulate through museums and visual culture. Andrew redirects attention away from the apparent authority of the original illustrations towards the structures that enabled their production and preservation. The installation asks the viewer not simply to look again at historical images, but to recognise that every act of viewing is already shaped by systems of display, interpretation and institutional memory.
The Vanishing Point
LAND BACK narrows the exhibition to a single photographic encounter without simplifying its concerns. Taken in May 2026 while Andrew was travelling on Aṉangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY) Lands with friends and senior Aṉangu, the photograph depicts an abandoned vehicle sprayed with the words “land back”. The phrase, now recognised internationally through movements for Indigenous sovereignty and land rights, appears as part of the landscape itself rather than as commentary imposed upon it. It belongs to the scene before it belongs to the photograph.
The image is striking for its directness. Throughout ROLLERCOASTER, Andrew repeatedly fragments, interrupts and reorganises images through collage, installation and moving image. Here those strategies are set aside. The photograph is neither layered nor materially reworked. Its formal restraint gives the work an unusual stillness within the exhibition. Yet that apparent simplicity does not produce certainty. The political and historical weight carried by the words extends far beyond what the camera records.
The photograph also reflects Andrew’s longstanding interest in language as a site of political tension. As with KILL PRIMITIVISM, words become inseparable from the image itself. They do not explain the photograph or function as a caption. They exist within the photographed world, carrying histories of dispossession, contested ownership and Indigenous sovereignty that remain unresolved within the frame.
The work is also shaped by absence. Andrew returned to the same location on the Stuart Highway three days after making the photograph. The abandoned vehicle had disappeared. What survives is not the object itself but the photographic record of a moment that can no longer be revisited. The image becomes evidence not simply of what was seen, but of what has already passed from view.
That temporal condition gives LAND BACK its quiet force. The work is neither nostalgic nor documentary in any conventional sense. It marks the interval between encounter and disappearance, reminding us that photography records moments whose physical circumstances have already begun to recede. The photograph holds that interval without attempting to resolve it.
It is significant that Andrew describes LAND BACK as the beginning of a new body of work. After an exhibition deeply concerned with archives, collections and historical images, this photograph suggests another direction—one grounded not in the reinterpretation of inherited material but in direct encounters with the contemporary landscape. The questions remain the same—history, sovereignty, memory and representation—but they are now carried by a single photograph whose apparent simplicity conceals the complexity of the histories it contains.
Staying With the Question
Returning towards the entrance, the first decision no longer appears incidental. What initially seemed a simple choice of direction reveals itself as part of Connor’s curatorial choreography. The exhibition never insists on a single sequence or a privileged reading. Instead, each work alters the way the next is encountered, while those encountered later continually reshape the memory of those already seen.
That openness mirrors Andrew’s practice. Photography, collage, installation, moving image and language remain distinct, yet none is permitted to stand alone. The exhibition is built through relationships rather than conclusions. Meaning accumulates gradually through movement, comparison and return.
Again and again, the exhibition returns to photographs, archives and museum collections—not to question whether history survives in them, but to ask how it is organised, interpreted and encountered. Andrew offers no certainty. He asks only that we look more carefully.
There is no final statement waiting at the end of ROLLERCOASTER: winhangadurinya in motion. Whether encountered early or late, LAND BACK embodies that refusal. A single photograph carries the same unresolved questions that have circulated throughout the exhibition: memory, sovereignty, absence and the persistence of history. Nothing is resolved. Nothing is explained away.
Andrew does not ask the viewer to leave with answers. He asks them to leave looking differently.
Nothing settles.
The exhibition leaves it that way.
Exhibition Details
Brook Andrew: ROLLERCOASTER: winhangadurinya in motion
Curated by Angela Connor
Museum of Australian Photography (MAPh)
Wheelers Hill, Victoria, Australia
6 June – 30 August 2026
