Published to accompany Brook Andrew’s 2008–09 exhibition Theme Park at AAMU, the Museum of Contemporary Aboriginal Art in Utrecht, this substantial catalogue documents one of Andrew’s most pointed engagements with the museum itself as a colonial machine.
Andrew turned the entire building into part of the work, drawing together ethnographic collections, archival photography, Aboriginal objects, kitsch Australiana, his own installations and contemporary art to ask who gets preserved, classified, aestheticised and displayed — and under whose terms.
The book includes essays by Marcia Langton, Nicholas Thomas and Anthony Gardner, an interview with Andrew by Maria Hlavajova, Georges Petitjean’s introduction, and Andrew’s own photographic material. The through-line is the politics of looking: anthropology, museum display, disappearance, colonial image-making and the uneasy afterlife of archives. Andrew repeatedly takes visual material produced under colonial conditions and reroutes it, making the supposedly dead museum image active again — not redeemed exactly, but made troublesome. The catalogue itself is unusually tactile and beautifully produced, with a cloth-covered optical-pattern binding and multiple coloured ribbon markers.
AAMU, Museum of Contemporary Aboriginal Art, Utrecht, 2008. First edition. Hardcover, illustrated throughout; bilingual English/Dutch text. 123 pp. ISBN 9789081351614. Published for the exhibition held 17 October 2008–13 April 2009. Very light shelf wear to boards and extremities. Internally clean and bright; binding firm. Ribbon markers intact. Near fine condition.
