Brook Andrew | Rollercoaster: Winhangadurinya in motion
Brook Andrew is an artist whose conceptual practice shifts across photography, performance, moving image, installation, public space and research, often through deep collaboration with artists, communities and friends. Working between places, histories and systems of representation, he brings together images, objects and ideas to question how stories are constructed, circulated and lived.
His practice is informed by his experiences as a Wiradjuri and Ngunnawal, kweer (queer) person from south eastern Australia, as well as an ongoing curiosity about the intersecting relationships between people, memory, culture and place. Across his work is a sustained engagement with visibility and invisibility, cultural inheritance, reciprocity and the often messy realities of human relationships with each other and the nonhuman world.
ROLLERCOASTER: winhangadurinya in motion presents a new commission alongside works from the Museum of Australian Photography’s collection, together with artworks, objects and archival materials from the artist’s own collection. Spanning more than three decades of research, experimentation and making, the exhibition reflects Andrew’s long engagement with photography as both a storytelling device and a contested archive. It considers photography’s relationship to colonial witnessing, evidence and the construction of historical narratives.
The title ROLLERCOASTER suggests erratic movement, emotional shifts, bodily sensation and the simultaneous pull of fear, joy and uncertainty. Winhangadurinya is a Wiradjuri concept from Andrew’s matrilineal language group in western New South Wales. Often understood as meditation, contemplation or deep reflection, it proposes a slower and more attentive way of looking, feeling and thinking. It asks us to stay with complexity, even when meaning is unresolved, and to allow understanding to emerge gradually.
GABAN: House of Strange reflects the artist’s personal experiences working with museum collections internationally. Originally developed through his theatre script GABAN and realised in collaboration with Black, Indigenous and kweer communities of diaspora, the work speaks to the emotional, political and spiritual weight carried by cultural objects and the deep yearning for their return.
ROLLERCOASTER: winhangadurinya in motion asks us to consider what remains – what we carry with us, what we let go of, and how meaning is shaped within an increasingly unstable and hypermediated world. At a time of accelerating digital culture, social media and artificial intelligence, the exhibition creates space for pause, reflection and imagination. It reminds us that the future is not fixed, but something still in motion. We can choose to shape our lives through attention, care, responsibility and collective thought.
