Photographer, Michael Cook with two of his series, Broken Dreams. Photo: Graham Tidy Michael Cook
Michael Cook (b. 1968, Brisbane) is a contemporary indigenous artist, who previously has worked 25 years as a commercial photographer. Cook’s photography series deals with the Australian history through personal stories by re-staging indigenous people in colonial narrative. He mostly addresses the first encounters with European people and indigenous people, and the notion of civilization, especially in his series Civilized.
His work has most recently been curated into Indigenous Australia: enduring civilisation at the British Museum, London; Taba Naba, Oceanographic Museum of Monaco; Saltwater Country at AAMU Museum of Contemporary Aboriginal Art, The Netherlands; and Personal Structures at Palazzo Mora, Venice during the 56th Venice Biennale. Cook’s photographs have also been exhibited in the 19th Biennale of Sydney: You Imagine What You Desire, 2014; the 2nd National Indigenous Triennial at the National Gallery of Australia, 2012; and the 7th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art at Queensland Art Gallery/ Gallery of Modern Art, 2013.
In 2017, he partakes in the group exhibition In the future everything will be as certain as it used to be at Framer Framed (16 March – 23 April 2017).
Exhibitions
