Dual/Duel

This 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’ archives.

A series of juxtaposed image propositions, its 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, concealment and shadow.

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.