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Brook Andrew stands at the centre of a scrum of curators in the small, elegant vestibule of the Art Gallery of NSW. Its a funny little jewel box of a place, all carved sandstone, mosaic floors, bronzes on marble pedestals.

Among the latter are copies of two allegorical works by 18th-century French sculptor Antoine Coysevox. One, Fame, blows her trumpet on a rearing steed. The other, similarly mounted, is the Roman messenger god Mercury, whose portfolio spanned travellers, boundaries, divination, luck and trickery, in addition to bread-and-butter eloquence and communication.

More pedestals cluster in an alcove across the room, topped with busts this time. The work is Melbourne artist Andrew Hazewinkels 12 Figures after Niccol, part of the temporary multi-venue exhibition of new Australian art, The National, which describes it as antique heads that turn out to be masks failing to conceal underlying collective anxiety.

You couldnt invent a more appropriate chorus than Fame, Mercury or those failing masks as Andrew outlines his plans for something newer and more expansive still to the posse of AGNSW curators: his six-venue, city-wide 22nd Biennale of Sydney, which will run from March to June next year.

Titled NIRIN edge in Wiradjuri, the language of his mothers people it will showcase 98 artists, creatives and collectives from 47 countries. As the title underlines, NIRIN is about putting art from the edge at the centre, or showing how all those edges come together to make a centre, as Andrew puts it. Many of the artists are people of colour, gay, queer or non-binary. Nor are all artists.

Andrew is also charting where art collides with science, ceremony, food, with contributors ranging from environmental researchers Drift Labs to cook Kylie Kwong and South Africas Breaking Bread collective. In other words, its a show about travellers, thresholds and boundaries. Stories and who gets to tell them, how. First and foremost, its about the tenor of our times: anxiety in all its myriad forms. All that underlies it, and how that can be brought to light.

Brook Andrew on shaking up the Biennale: Whats not at stake? Everythings at stake. Things need to shift dramatically. And theyre going to shift anyway.Credit:Tim Bauer

With his impassive face, wide blue eyes and greying curls, Andrew, 49, is a game-changer for Australias oldest and largest biennale, which started in 1973. Not only is he the first Indigenous artistic director, hes also the first to be an artist. And the latter is at least as important as the former. His friend Marcia Langton calls him one of the definitive Aboriginal provocateurs in the Australian art world, known for reinterpreting colonial and modern history and offering alternative perspectives, as the National Gallery of Victoria said of the career survey it held of Andrews work in 2017, The Right to Offend is Sacred.

As the Biennale of Sydney enters adulthood and at an interesting time for big art shows and museology generally Andrew is very consciously positioning his on the faultlines of now, such as gender, sexuality and race, the environment and what art and biennales are and do, where old definitions are breaking down and being reformed. Or inside those faultlines, as he tells Good Weekend, where the real action is taking place and the partys happening. He is doing so, his NIRIN online statement of curatorial intent says, because, the urgent states of our contemporary lives are laden with unresolved past anxieties and hidden layers of the supernatural.

This meeting with the AGNSWs curatorial team eight months out, in mid-July, is to start to nail down how those anxieties and supernatural layers might surface at Sydneys oldest gallery. Andrew has earmarked the vestibule for Lismore artist Karla Dickens. Shes been making these wild cages with artworks in them, he says. I imagine she will be hanging things? one AGNSW curator asks. Are they light? Theyre not massive steel structures, are they? Someone else chimes in: Its a heritage building. We have to work with what we have.

Andrew looks thoughtful. Im going to talk to her about hanging some textiles, he says, surveying the rooms hard surfaces. This is a very special place. It can be a bit cold, the curator says. Well, its about transforming it, Andrew muses. So that it feels more womb-like, a bit like a cuddle. Its about creating new narratives and perspectives.

The old narrative and perspective are, of course, written across the other side of the vestibule wall. Along the left flank of the AGNSWs neoclassical facade, bronze relief panels begin to depict what were seen at the time as the major art periods: Assyrian, Egyptian, Grecian, Roman, Gothic and Renaissance. Two world wars and their associated metal shortages intervened, however, leaving the last two blank. Andrews Biennale will more than compensate.

Ghanaian artist Ibrahim Mahama has been commissioned to wrap the front of the gallery, a choice that underlines how close Andrew is to the art-world pulse. In April, Mahama, who is famous for what one reviewer called his monuments to the anonymous reflecting on trade, migration and globalisation, wrapped Milans historical Porta Venezia tollgates in a loosely sewn camouflage of jute sacks from home, as he had done to the historic watch gates in Kassel, central Germany, for the last Documenta exhibition in 2017.

A month later, his bunker-like, mesh installation of found objects became one of the star turns at Mays Venice Biennale. As Andrew tells the curators: Its about the strength of that facade, which is the sort of statement of colonial strength and legacy you see in cities like this around the world. What I love about Ibrahim is the way he makes things disappear and reappear differently. Its about what comes forward and what falls back and then what you walk into all kinds of thresholds.

From the front, visitors will cop that cuddle from Karla before proceeding to the gallerys central hall, which connects the Grand Courts, designed like the facade by turn-of-last-century government architect, Walter Liberty Vernon, to both the Captain Cook Wing, commissioned to commemorate the explorers bicentenary in 1970, and the 1988 extension opened for the national bicentenary, both by then NSW Government Architect Andrew Andersons.

As that underlines, the entry court is a collision of eras and intents. Entering it, you realise just how rich this territory is for a man like Brook Andrew. A man who in addition to his sprawling Biennale is completing both a PhD at Oxford University on the power of objects to transform inherited histories, and an Australian Research Council project on Australias frontier wars. A man whose CV states his home base as Melbourne, Oxford and Berlin; who has for years now been in perpetual motion, forging the international connections and reputation he is leveraging for this Biennale. A man, too, for whom the reference to layers of the supernatural is anything but casual. I believe in ghosts, because I see them, he tells Good Weekend. I believe in spirits, because I talk to them. It helps me. It just helps guide me through life.

Andrew plans to fill the entry court with screen-printed texts from the work of the man he describes as one of the grandfathers of the land rights movement, the late Pitjantjatjara artist Kunmanara Williams. And glimpsed through his eyes, every inch of this place does indeed become almost radioactive with meaning. Not only are we standing in the seam between eras of the gallery, usually commissioned as statements of statehood, but were doing so in the moment before it all changes again, with work about to begin on the AGNSWs $344 million Sydney Modern expansion, staking its claim in the competitive global game that contemporary art has become since the opening of Londons Tate Modern in 2000.

As AGNSW director Michael Brand tells a group of Biennale donors the next day, the gallery has always reflected the eras of its city, from our links to London in the late 19th century to being the first museum to buy and exhibit Aboriginal works as art and then turning to Asia in the late 70s and 80s. As it will again with NIRIN. Its one of those global moments, Brand says. I dont think anyone else from Australia has made it to some of the places Brook has, so his insertions really make sense when you think of [the AGNSW] as a place that represents a particular society and a particular world view.

"A man like Brook Andrew isnt just a turn of phrase. For the purposes of this Biennale, the man himself matters more than usual. By definition, such shows are about capturing the zeitgeist. But Andrew seems to be capturing a very particular moment of fluidity and flux in his butterfly net. And to many, its a job he was born for.

Everyone on the panel that selected him for the job with whom Good Weekend speaks including Michael Brand, Powerhouse Museum CEO Lisa Havilah, Museum of Contemporary Art director Elizabeth Macgregor and M+ Hong Kong art museum head Suhanya Raffel is clear: Andrew was the only possible choice. That is in part because it was high time for an Indigenous curator. But in larger part its because it was time for Brook Andrew, says Havilah, who met him more than 20 years ago when she was working at Casula Powerhouse in Sydneys west and he was an art student at the University of Western Sydney (now Western Sydney University).

Brook is perfectly placed to push forward this historical model of the Biennale, which has been operating for more than 40 years, she says. He comes out of this incredibly suburban context, but he has this ability to think in multiple dimensions. And to bring forward histories and stories and represent them in very contemporary ways, but at the same time challenge those narratives.

Andrews international reputation not only as an artist but as a curator also shifts the relevance and importance of the Biennale internationally, Havilah says. And as a gay man, of mixed Wiradjuri (on his mothers side) and Scottish (on his fathers) descent, and also the father of an 11-year-old son, he brings various other identities in addition to his Indigeneity, says Raffel.

The faultlines are intensifying and polarising on so many issues around the globe, regardless of which position you take. The world is facing all kinds of big questions: existential questions, environmental questions, sustainability issues, issues of identity and belonging. And Brook captures that complexity. As Macgregor puts it: We wanted a Biennale that projected some critical ideas, a Biennale that investigated what art means in a time of globalisation, refugees, Trump, populism, and that engaged meaningfully with First Nations.

The man of the moment, then. But hardly a household name, despite a distinguished 25-year career. Certainly not a safe choice in a town dedicated to safety, from its lockout laws to its hardly edgy annual light show, Vivid. The panel members may be unanimous the institutions they represent bending over backwards to help Andrew realise his vision, if the AGNSW is any indication but word is there were rumblings in the clouds above their heads, though none of them will be drawn on the subject. Would the international art world come to a Biennale with an Indigenous artistic director? Would Andrew be able to pull it off?

The latter is a live question, given the scale of both Andrews ambitions and the expectations riding on his shoulders. But those who have worked with him for years have no doubt. Hell knock it out of the park, says MCA curator Anne Loxley, who compares his appointment to the announcement in March that the Indonesian collective Ruangrupa would be the first Asian curators of Documenta, the worlds most prestigious contemporary art show, in 2022. Its deeply important, Loxley says. They are going to change the rules and I think that is what Brook is going to do, too.

It comes back to what a biennale is meant to be, Andrew says. For me, its still [redolent of] the great expositions of the 18th and 19th centuryshowing off exotic colonial wealthTo me, this is an opportunity to help redress all thator allow for new things to happen. NIRIN is about shining a light on parts of the world that arent so European or North American. And its the first time the Biennale has had such a high number of people of colour, non-binary and queer artists. I think those stories are so urgent, and to have them all together is just so powerful.

Andrew has been building to NIRIN for years. Even if you just take the tranche of work he has done for the MCA in the past 15 years, from Blakatak, the ground-breaking talk and performance series he curated in 2005, to the exhibition and talks program TABOO seven years later. Then theres Warrang, his installation on the facade of the MCAs 2012 extension. It features a giant LED arrow, filled with the black-and-white zigzag a reworking of traditional Wiradjuri dendroglyph or tree-carving patterns that is a constant motif in his work. The arrow points to the remains of the colonial naval docks below, the heritage purpose for which it was commissioned. But its more than that. Those docks also mark where the First Fleet landed in Sydney Harbour. His arrow is a giant piece of wayfinding to all that has gone before or is just gone.

Andrews career, too, has always combined curation, collaboration and ranged across disciplines and media. His practice is a research practice but its also a printmaking practice, a painting practice, a photography practice, says Havilah. What really drives him is the storytelling and the disruption of history the engagement with ideas from multiple perspectives. Making work is just part of that practice.

TABOO was an interesting lesson for him in how you negotiate your practice as an artist with your practice as a curator, adds Macgregor. Brook wanted it to be like an artistic installation, with colour and shape and painted walls and no labels. He brought his over-arching aesthetic to bear on the material. Fortunately, those artists were happy with that but you could have had artists who disagreed. As Loxley says: Give an artist a curatorial job and hell give you an artwork.

Andrew asks, Whats not at stake? Everythings at stake. Things need to shift dramatically. And theyre going to shift anyway.

Brook Andrew unveils his portrait of Professor Marcia Langton at Canberras National Portrait Gallery in 2010. Credit:Glen McCurtayne

Brook Andrew was 15 when he got his first real inkling of just how much the picture had to change. It was the mid-1980s and his biology teacher at Cambridge Park High School in western Sydney decided to bring the class up to speed on the first Australians. He was hysterical, Andrew remembers. He wore Hawaiian shirts and Stubbies, long socks, often thongs. And he stood out the front and pointed to his thumb and said, Real Aboriginal people have swirls on their thumbs and theres only a few of them left in the Central Desert.

Andrew was flabbergasted. Unmoored, he says, by the image conjured. It took a while for the full implications to sink in. I went home and I remember discussing it with Mum and she was rolling her eyes and having a giggle about it. I didnt really understand the gravitas until days and years went by. It made me think a lot more about the lack of visibility and representation. As if half of my body felt missing.

Andrew was growing up in the years leading up to the bicentenary. In the suburbs, where his father was a truck driver and his mother a homemaker raising four children. While there was a strong sense of his culture at home and in his extended family, for Andrew it had no wider context. I mean, there were about six Aboriginal kids in my year, and a lot of them were big footballers, so there wasnt much racism. But there was also no history of Aboriginal Australia or the frontier wars at school, for instance.

Another corresponding eureka moment came when he was 19. By then Id become very active in arts and Indigenous issues, he says. And one day my Aboriginal grandmother, who I was living with at the time, turned around to me and said, Brook, youre also white, you know. And it hit me like a ton of bricks, because she was very important to me and she was proud of her father, who was Scottish and Irish. She always kept me in balance. Its interesting, because even Aboriginal people say that white person, this white person and I just didnt grow up with that black against white, because all the white people in my family were allies. As my mother always said, We are a salt-and-pepper family.

Brook Andrews Jumping Castle War Memorial was so popular among 2010 Biennale of Sydney visitors, bouncing on it had to be banned.Credit:Brook Andrew

It is one reason humour and fun loom so large in his work, from Warrang to his zigzag-patterned inflatable objects, or the Jumping Castle War Memorial he made for the 2010 Biennale of Sydney, an actual jumping castle that so many adults took to in the first few days that jumping had to be banned for the pieces survival. Black humour is vital when were dealing with conflicted and traumatic histories, he says. Humour and having a lightness and balance is important for healing. Its important for letting a breath out, its important for truth-telling.

In the years that followed his big biology lesson, Andrew began to dig even toying with becoming an archaeologist. The first ethnographic photos I found were at Sydneys Mitchell Library in 1995, he recalls. They were so devoid of our lives. Its weird how somebody else owns the history of your peoples bodies and that representation.

Years later, he would come across the much larger hoard at the Royal Anthropological Institute in London that would inspire his 2007 series Gun-metal Grey, which conjure and conceal by turn their anonymous subjects, like lenticular lenses, a technique he says he laboured mightily to perfect. As he told Marcia Langton in an interview for a 2014 essay: I find it a complete and utter mystery. Because theyre from a time and a place that I myself, and my immediate family dont have any recollection ofitslike disappeared history.

Just a year after finding that first cache of pictures in the Mitchell, Andrew would create the work that made his name, 1996s Sexy and dangerous, a highly coloured rendering of a sepia photograph of a young Aboriginal warrior. The work became as immediately iconic as the lushly ironic Something More series by Tracey Moffatt, an artist Andrew cites as an early influence. And not just in Australia.

Andrews breakthrough work Sexy and dangerous (1996).Credit:

For a while there, it was on every bus stop in Tokyo, Langton says of Sexy and dangerous. If you look up the original, its just one of those horrible ethnographic photos. And in just a few moves, he makes that young man so handsome, so human, and the very colonial intent of dehumanising and turning him into a scientific experiment is almost entirely shed, but not so much that you dont recognise that its there.

Sexy and dangerous nailed all eyes, as if something that had needed to be expressed had finally found form. That message, We are sexy and dangerous and what gaze does not allow us this power, was a message that we needed and we still need, says MCA curator Anne Loxley. So obsessed did the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) become with the work, says director Tony Ellwood, that it bought two of an original edition of 20 to ensure it could keep it on permanent display.

The speed with which Andrew had arrived was remarkable, particularly as hed taken his time getting started. After finishing school, he had studied marine biology in central Queenslands Rockhampton for a year. His parents, who had always encouraged him to follow his clear artistic bent, thought he was crazy. I needed to get away from the western suburbs, he says. Because even though theyre thriving, Im a gay man and I was growing up in [an area] that was homophobic and where Aboriginal people were football heroes.

Loxley first met Andrew just after this time, when she had her first curatorial job at Sydneys S.H. Ervin Gallery and he was doing a placement prior to studying art at university. He was quite contained and enigmatic, she recalls. But he always had charm. He was a proud Aboriginal man, but it wasnt just his cultural identity. He was interesting. He had a sense of his own intellect. There was something fascinating about him.

Charged with keeping Andrew occupied, Loxley asked him to re-cover the offices shabby chaise longue. It was a very average job, she says. Lets just say there were no signs of the phenomenal talent to come. That changed when she saw a work in his 1993 art graduation show, White Word I, now in the MCA collection. There had been something unreachable about him and then I saw that and I thought, Oh my god, hes not only talented but hes smart and hes brave.

Loxley and fellow curator Felicity Fenner included Andrew in their 1994 show of emerging artists, Fresh Art. That was when I got to know him deeply, she says. He can be as silly as me and so much fun mad fun the most fun. Just two years later, Sexy and dangerous landed. I dont think any of his works have passed into the canon in the same way, Loxley says. It has a communicability about it. You dont have to know much at all to get what is going on there.

As the sheer scope and range of work on show at last years NGV career survey demonstrated, Andrew has roamed across media and moods, from Gun-metal Grey to his neon and inflatable works. He goes from the absolute spectacular to the quite cerebral, miniature, detailed, conceptual, Ellwood says. I find him incredibly intriguing. There is always a slightly dangerous edge to his work. But its cloaked in this beauty. That is something very clever about him and its something I think all great artists do.

That beauty is anything but incidental. As Langton points out, it redeems all that is lost, much as his use of light is resurrectionary. Every bit as political as everything else about his work. And for all the immediacy of that first 1996 image, his subsequent work has been much more nuanced, Loxley says. Thats why hes one of the very top Australian artists for me. I like my art to mean something and to keep giving me stuff. His work always deals with something really important and something I didnt know and it always tells me in a way that is poetic rather than didactic. And the range of media he has mastered and his craftsmanship are out of this world. I like my art beautiful and he makes beautiful things.

Hes just got that artists eye, right? Which doesnt turn off, says Langton. Sometimes we come across people in art who have a special vision, and special talents. Hes just one of those very special people. With an extraordinary vision and awareness and capacity to work hard.

Not that Andrew is without detractors. Over the years, some artists and curators have accused him of being insufficiently respectful of aspects of the history that is his subject matter, which Andrew says is a complicated history to unpack. The fluency and fluidity of his work, its chameleon quality, has also perhaps meant he has not crystallised in the popular consciousness on the scale he may have had, had he stuck to one medium, theme, style.

Sometimes we come across people in art who have a special vision, and special talents. Hes just one of those very special people. With an extraordinary vision and awareness and capacity to work hard.

Hes certainly become ubiquitous, though, even in his variety. As the AGNSWs Brand points out, the first works that greet visitors to Sydneys main art museums are two very different Andrew creations: Warrang at the MCA and, at the AGNSW, the recently acquired AUSTRALIA VI, a large, coppery canvas based on an etching by the 18th-century German artist Gustav Mtzel of a corroboree he never saw.

That may have something to do with the currency of what Brand sees as Andrews overriding characteristic: curiosity. Theres certainly a political element in him, no question. But more than that, Brook is curious. Which is exactly what museums need most now. Curiosity is what you should enter a museum with, Brand says. Not to go see one work you know you like and then leave again, but with a sense of curiosity.

Brook Andrews Warrang arrow (2012) features a pattern derived from markers used by his mothers Wiradjuri ancestors.Credit:Brook Andrew

The zigzag motif that runs across Andrews career isnt confined to his art. A tiny blue-and-black version appears when he calls, where a photo might be. The pattern, ancient and modern, is both his sword and his shield. For a provocateur, Andrew is also fiercely guarded. He is happy to talk about his parents, who now live in Queensland and both of whom, inspired by their sons example, went back to study. His mother, Veronica, took a bachelor of visual arts and his father, Trevor, studied writing, journalism and social sciences. Theyre both dedicated community people, Andrew says. My father helps run the Shed Happens mens mental health group in Deception Bay and my mother belongs to the Yinna Yarnan womens group. I am so lucky to have them.

But his three siblings, like his son, are entirely off-limits because, he says, Im private. It is hardly surprising if you think of Andrews career as a decades-long investigation of what it means to be seen and not seen, forgotten or framed. Of who gets to look, and for what purpose. I refuse to be fixed, he says. No one should be. Theres so much to navigate especially for Aboriginal artists, who have to look a certain way or have certain politics. People are always being fixed by other people. Why do we do it to each other?

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Brook Andrew: The first artist and Indigenous man to lead the Biennale of Sydney - Sydney Morning Herald