Dual/Duel - AAANZ | The Art Association of Australia and New Zealand

Publication Details Hardcover 184 pages, 133 illustrations, 36.5 x 27.5 cm, 1.976 kg; Edition of 500 copies in red and yellow cloth; Printed 2020. ISBN: 978-0-944139-3-2

Author and/or Editor name/s Brook Andrew, Trent Walter and Maxine Briggs

Author and/or Editor bio/s Brook Andrew is a Wiradjuri/Celtic artist who is driven by the collisions of intertwined narratives, often emerging from the mess of the “Colonial Hole”. He was Artistic Director of NIRIN, the 22nd Biennale of Sydney, 2020, and is currently Enterprise Professor, Interdisciplinary Practice at the University of Melbourne and Associate Professor, Fine Art at Monash University.

Trent Walter is a Sri Lankan/Australia artist and publisher interested in the intersection of contemporary art and printed matter. His imprint, Negative Press, is a publisher of limited-edition prints and artists’ books by contemporary Australian artists.

Maxine Briggs is a Taungwurrung and Yorta Yorta woman, and Koori Librarian at the State Library Victoria.

Year of publication 2021

Publisher Published by Negative Press & Garru Editions, Melbourne

Abstract Dual/Duel is a collaborative artists’ book by Brook Andrew and Trent Walter, drawn predominantly from the State Library of Victoria’s pictures collection, with interventions from the artists’ personal archives. The book’s form is a series of juxtaposed image propositions whose assembly forms new relational narratives connecting the artists’ cultural perspectives of Wiradjuri/Sri Lankan/Celtic/European with topics of conflict, immigration, hope, confusion, complicity and power amongst image, shape, trickery, concealment and shadow play. This practice of image juxtaposition is prevalent in Andrew’s and Walter’s artistic and cultural practices which re-define how the world can be reordered and seen. This perspective shifts ideas around building memories, timelines and making visible often devastating histories in ways that can hopefully heal: to imagine new ways to engage and acknowledge.

Dual/Duel creates a new space for looking through often cliché, but specific, images of power and narrative. The artists’ book simultaneously creates and examines pictorial connections that explore the implications of these associations to form new narratives about how we might begin to explain the histories they conjure.

Dual/Duel is the result of a Georges Mora Fellowship awarded to the artists in 2014. The publication includes an interview with Maxine Briggs, Koori Librarian at the State Library of Victoria (SLV), Australia, who worked closely with the artists on Australian Indigenous protocols that apply to SLV photographic collections.