Viewing South – Melbourne Art Fair 2008

Viewing South at the Melbourne Art Fair (video installation)

Brook Andrew is an Australian artist of Wiradjuri (aboriginal) and Scottish ancestry. His practice is conceptual, interdisciplinary and addresses issues of colonisation through a world immersed in popular media. A prolific artist, his practice is driven by philosophical questions, such as ‘Who are we?’ and engages with issues about predominant cultural and media content. Often his works review the language of global mass media and their representations of identity according to place. Preferring to be understood as a contemporary artist rather than labeled an Indigenous artist, Brook’s practice is generally motivated by political issues that often have an Indigenous concern. 

Brook Andrew participated in the 2006 curated project, Trans Versa: Artists from Australia and New Zealand presented as part of the Santiago Gathering at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chile in October 2006.  Brook’s video installation consisted of a series of interviews conducted in Chile and Argentina that considered the idea of blakness, visual ethnic divide and cultural identity.  This project was a continuation of a series of similar interviews conducted in Western Europe during other residencies

Brook is prodigious in his ability to create works across media that critique the treatment of and attitudes towards Australian Indigenous people, while enabling the politics and identity in his work to continually shift and engage audiences at many different levels beyond local specificity.  It is this very point that makes his video installation work so relevant to present in Melbourne.

Chilean artist Claudia del Fierro was awarded a residency with the South Project in partnership with RMIT University in July 2007.  Her residency proposal and later exhibition titled the Sweet Promise at Project Space, consisted of a series of interviews conducted in Melbourne with recent migrants to Australia.  It explored the concept of the promise land/dream for those that had migrated to Australia and contrasted by the reality of assimilation, cultural difference and their actual experiences. Early 2008, this work was exhibited at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, Santiago, Chile.

As a migrant herself, Claudia left Santiago, Chile, during the dictatorship in in the 70s, and made a new home for herself in the United States.  She has experienced the awkwardness of living in a foreign place, language barriers and cultural stereotypes as a ‘latino’.  Although Claudia has since returned to Santiago she now considers herself as an outsider in her own country.  What differentiates her work from documentary style is the threading of phrases from her interviews into a script that is later re-enacted by young ‘beautiful’ Australian actors of Western European heritage.  What emerges in a resonance in text, yet a unsettling sense of irony when you here these young actors speak: There are times when I have identity problems because I think that I will never be 100% accepted because of...I don’t know, my looks...