Brook Andrew
Death of a Memorial
2 October - 7 November, 2025
Death of a Memorial installation brings together a new wall drawing commissioned for Passage Gallery and Jumping Castle War Memorial (commissioned by DETACHED, Hobart and UQ Art Museum, in association with Urban Art Projects), and featured in the 17th Biennale of Sydney. Jumping Castle War Memorial was first presented at the 2010 Biennale of Sydney., is a monumental inflatable installation that collapses the boundaries between play and trauma, entertainment and mourning. Its form—a jumping castle emblazoned with black and white pattern derived from Wiradjuri designs—parodies the authority of traditional monuments while interrogating how histories of war, genocide, and colonial violence are remembered, commodified, and trivialised.
The Passage Gallery walls are adorned with Brook Andrew's Wiradjuri pattern which is spliced with shapes in the colours of the Australian and Aboriginal flags. For this closing iteration, the Jumping Castle War Memorial inflatable is in a funeral style mourning enclosure where the gallery acts as a glass viewing room for the artwork's death. This act embodies the exhaustion of the memorial as a fixed, authoritative form, speaking to the global tide of dismantled or vandalised monuments—from Confederate statues in the United States, to toppled imperial figures in the United Kingdom, to Soviet-era memorials across Eastern Europe. These removals highlight the fragility of monumental structures to contain unresolved histories and the contested, shifting nature of public memory.
For Indigenous peoples, the destruction of monuments resonates on a deeper level. Aboriginal massacre sites and memorials, such as those commemorating the Myall Creek massacre, have been repeatedly vandalised, while sacred places like Juukan Gorge in Western Australia have been desecrated for extractive industry. These violations reveal both the endurance and the vulnerability of Indigenous histories in the face of ongoing erasure.
The collection of plastic skulls displayed in the Jumping Castle’s corner towers are a direct reference to another violent legacy: the Aboriginal human remains trade that began with the British invasion. For more than a century, Aboriginal people’s graves were desecrated, and the bones of men, women, and children were collected and dispersed into scientific, medical, and private collections across Australia and the world. While many of these remains have since been repatriated to their communities, many others remain locked in institutional storage or denied return. Andrew’s use of skull iconography draws attention to this history of dehumanisation and commodification of Aboriginal bodies, situating the work within the larger narrative of dispossession and cultural survival.
By staging the final destruction of Jumping Castle War Memorial, I reposition the work as a counter-monument. Its collapse is not only an ending but a performance of cultural and historical reckoning: a reminder that memorials are never permanent vessels of memory, but contested, fragile, and alive—subject to cycles of reverence, resistance, neglect, and erasure. In this final gesture, Death of a Memorial becomes an act of catharsis, insisting that memory itself requires continual renewal and confrontation rather than static commemoration.
Photography by Jessica Maurer
About The Artist
Brook presents his artwork in Australia and internationally, with research-based museum and public space interventions, and Wiradjuri language being central to his practice. Brook’s museum interventions began in 1996 with Dispersed Treasures at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum, Exeter. The use of Wiradjuri language began shortly after, evident in early works such as Ngajuu Ngaay Nginduugirr (I see you) (1998), an installation combining photographic print and neon text. In 2017, Brook’s artistic career was recognised with a large-scale, immersive solo exhibition – Brook Andrew: The Right to Offend is Sacred at the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne.
Projects include The National 4: Australian Art Now (2023), Campbelltown Arts Centre; No Feeling is Final: Solidarity collection of MOCA Skopje curated by WHW (What, How and for Whom), Kunsthalle Wien, opening April 2023; Liverpool Biennial 2023 uMoya: The sacred Return of Lost Things opening June 2023; and a video installation at Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP) opening in August 2023; a new multi-channel video, live performances and installation GABAN (2022) in YOYI! Care, Repair, Heal, Gropius Bau, Berlin; solo exhibition ngaay ngajuu dhugul birra (to see my skin broken) (2022), Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris; GABAN: Gunmetal Grey (2022), a solo at Roslyn Oxley 9, Sydney; and participation in Sharjah Biennial 15:Thinking Historically in the Present (2023).
As a curator, Brook was the artistic director of the First Nations and artist-led NIRIN: the 22nd Biennale of Sydney (2020). Following this work, he was an international advisor for the Sámi Pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale (2022), and a co-curator of YOYI Care, Repair, Heal at the Gropius Bau (2022) along with Kader Attia, Giscard Bouchotte, Natasha Ginwala, Bárbara Rodríguez Muñoz, under the curatorial lead of Stephanie Rosenthal in collaboration with SERAFINE1369, In House: Artist in Residence 2021. Other significant curatorial projects include TABOO (2012-2013), an exhibition and program of talks, performances and films screenings at the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia that brought together Australian and international to respond to ideas around race, ethnicity, politics and religion.
As a leading thinker and researcher in his field, Brook is Enterprise Professor in Interdisciplinary Practice and Director of Reimagining Museums and Collections at the University of Melbourne; Associate Researcher, Pitt Rivers Museum and Associate Research in the Wominjeka Djeembana research lab, Monash University. He holds a DPhil from the Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford.
In his role as Director of Reimagining Museums and Collections at the University of Melbourne (2022 - ongoing), Brook founded BLAK C.O.R.E, a collective driven by First Nations methodologies, research and cultural practices focusing on walumarra (protection), yindyamarra gunhanha (ongoing respect) and murungidyal (healing in the museum). With Professor Brian Martin, Brook is also leading the Australian Research Council project More than a guulany (tree): Aboriginal Knowledge Systems (2021-2023), hosted by Monash University. In 2019, Brook concluded a 4-year long Australian Research Council grant, Representation, Remembrance and the Memorial. Based at Monash University, this project was designed to respond to the repeated high-level calls for a national memorial to Aboriginal loss and the Frontier Wars.
Brook is Adjunct Curator ngurambang-ayinya (First Nations), Guggenheim Abu Dhabi (2023-ongoing), and Artistic Associate of the Powerhouse Museum, Sydney, where he is curating a major exhibition for 2026 on global Indigenous ways of being.
Apart from leading the forum Indigenous Visions, on 16th April, 2024, during the Venice Biennale (a collaboration between Guggenheim Abu Dhabi and Museums and Collections, University of Melbourne), Brook has presented numerous public lectures, panels and talks, recent highlights include: the March Meeting, Sharjah Art Foundation, Sharjah (2022); Reclaim the Earth at Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2022); Oceanic Imaginaries at Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2022); Decolonizing Provenance Research conference at Musée d’ethnographie de Genève, Geneva (2021); and Asia Society's Arts and Museum Summit, online (2021).
In addition to his artistic and scholarly practices, Brook established the publishing arm Garru Editions in 2020. Publications include galang 01 and galang 02 (2022), volumes by the Powerhouse-galang, an Indigenous-led think tank, collective and sovereign space initiated by Brook in his role as Powerhouse artistic associate. Dual/Duel (2021), a collaborative artist book by Brook and Trent Walter, was also produced by Garru Editions; and in 2025 a story consultant and researcher for the Australian ABCTV second series “The Art Of... S2”.