2012
Photograph Inkjet print on paper
Image 990 x 865 mm

Provenance
The Cat Street Gallery, Hong Kong

Michael Cook is an Australian art photographer who was born in 1968. He worked commercially in Australia and overseas for twenty-five years before he began to make art photography in 2009, driven by an increasingly urgent desire to explore issues of identity. He is of mixed ancestry – some of which is Indigenous – and works from an Australian base. Cook’s photographs are represented is in all major Australian collections, and in significant international collections including the British Museum, London, The Museum of World Cultures, Netherlands, Museum of Contemporary Aboriginal Art, Utrecht, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, and the Kluge-Ruhe Aboriginal Art Collection, USA.

In Cook’s ‘Civilised’ series, Indigenous Australians are dressed in the period fashion of the four European countries — Spain, the Netherlands, England and France — whose explorers first visited Australia. He incorporates text from the explorers’ writings and journals, in which they recorded their first contact with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. In restaging the past from an Indigenous perspective, Cook challenges the perceptions that underpin what it means to be civilised.