The 2020 Australia Council Awards were announced on Monday night. The eight artists celebrated included Brook Andrew who was honoured with the 2020 Australia Council Award for Visual Arts. The award acknowledges Andrew’s “outstanding and sustained contribution to Australian visual art.”
Brook Andrew is the first Indigenous artistic director the Biennale of Sydney. The theme he selected for 2020 is Nirin, a Wiradjuri word which defies straightforward translation into English. In a recent Art Guide Australia interview Andrew discusses his rational for the Biennale. Nirin opens to the public on 14 March.
As an artist, Andrew’s overarching project can be characterised as one of decolonisation and to this end he has worked with a number of well known ethnographic collections overseas, including a stint as the Photography Residencies Laureate at the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris in 2016, and a 2017 exhibition which responded to Aboriginal Australian objects at the Musée d’ethnographie de Genève in Switzerland. In 2017 he also undertook a research fellowship at the Smithsonian in Washington DC, USA. Andrew is an associate researcher at the Pitt Rivers Museum, part of Oxford University in the UK where he is currently a PhD candidate.
Previous winners include: Susan Norrie (2019), Pat Brassington (2018), Susan Cohn (2017), Richard Bell (2016), Judy Watson (2015), Fiona Foley (2014), and Tracey Moffatt (2012).
At the award ceremony, r e a, who also works in the realm of visual arts, was honoured with The 2020 Australia Council Award for Emerging and Experimental Arts.
The complete list of creatives who received 2020 Australia Council Awards is: Margaret Wild (Lifetime Achievement in Literature), Deborah Conway AM (Don Banks Music Award), Brook Andrew (Visual Arts Award), r e a (Emerging and Experimental Arts), Michelle Ryan (Dance), Tommy Murphy (Theatre), Kath Duncan (Ros Bower Award), and Autumn Skuthorpe (Kirk Robson Award).
French-born/Belgium-based Laure Prouvost animates her first major Australian survey with her hallmark absurdism. ‘Oui Move In You’ is showing now at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art.
Kamilaroi/Bigambul artist Archie Moore has won the Golden Lion for Best National Participation at the Venice Biennale for his monumental work, kith and kin. It marks the first time Australia has won the award in the event’s 130-year history.
Endlessly inventive, the work of Hong Kong-born, Melbourne-based artist Scotty So spans photography, painting, video work, and drag performance. With a dual exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ballarat, So talks about pageantry, begonias and queens.
An exhibition at UQ Art Museum centres the relationship between culture, tradition and the ocean, and illuminates how intergenerational storytelling, tied to oceanic themes, might subvert settler-colonial narratives.
The National Gallery of Victoria has unveiled their summer blockbuster exhibition for 2024–2025. Yayoi Kusama’s signature polka dots and pumpkins, along with world-premiere work, will appear in Australia’s largest retrospective exhibition of the Japanese artist.
“It’s a call for the celebration of the multiplicity of perspectives, and the gathering of different viewpoints.” Ahead of the Biennale’s opening this weekend, we talk with long-time collaborators Cosmin Costinaș and Inti Guerrero about how this year’s Biennale is one of celebration, not fatalism.
