Brook Andrew: ‘Death of a Memorial’

Passage is a non-commercial installation art gallery in Sydney’s Chinatown, visible from the street day and night. For each exhibition, one artist is commissioned to transform the space into an immersive, site-specific environment.

Brook Andrew's Death of a Memorial exhibition brings together a new wall drawing commissioned for Passage Gallery and Jumping Castle War Memorial—a monumental inflatable installation first presented at the 17th Biennale of Sydney. Adorned with Wiradjuri pattern and encased in a black-and-white mourning enclosure, the work transforms the gallery into a glass viewing room for the artwork’s final resting place. This closing iteration embodies the exhaustion of the memorial as a fixed, authoritative form, speaking to the global tide of contested remembrance.

Across the walls, Andrew’s Wiradjuri designs are spliced with shapes in the colours of the Australian and Aboriginal flags, collapsing national and cultural symbols into a tense visual field. The installation interrogates how histories of war, genocide, and colonial violence are remembered, commodified, and trivialised.

Through this powerful gesture, Death of a Memorial invites reflection on the persistence of memory and the possibilities of renewal through truth-telling and cultural resistance.

An accompanying public program, Death of a Memorial: Critical Forum, will be held on Saturday 25 October at UTS Green Theatre — a day of conversation, poetry, and making curated by Nathan mudyi Sentance.

This ambitious project is supported by expanded funding from the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund, with an accompanying day of public programs presented in late October. Passage is also supported by the NSW Government through Create NSW, the City of Sydney Creative Grants, and the Australian Government through Creative Australia, its principal arts investment and advisory body.

Images photographed by Jessica Maurer