A bus full of passengers, a city street, a railway tunnel. The settings are familiar. Look at the people, though, and a different picture of Australia emerges.
In Michael Cook’s photographic series Majority Rule, the same Aboriginal man appears again and again, occupying public spaces in an imagined country where Indigenous people are the majority.
The exhibition opens at Tweed Regional Gallery today (Friday, October 30), inviting viewers to consider how that reversal changes their reading of otherwise ordinary urban scenes.
Cook digitally multiplies his subject across settings including a vintage bus, monuments and city streets. Rather than depicting a crowd of different people, the repeated figure makes the construction of each scene unmistakable.
The effect is to turn a familiar social structure around, asking who Australians expect to see in these spaces and what happens when those expectations are disrupted.
The gallery describes the photographs as ‘observational, asking questions without proffering any neat prescriptive conclusions’.
Created in 2014, the series uses staged images to explore discrimination, identity and power. Its new presentation in Tweed gives local audiences an opportunity to encounter those questions through the detail of individual photographs.
Among the works is Majority rule (bus), an inkjet print from the collection of Alan Pigott.
The exhibition is a Tweed Regional Gallery initiative and runs until March 27, 2027.
The gallery is at 2 Mistral Road, South Murwillumbah. Visitors can also see its other current exhibitions, including Gerwyn Davies’ Sunburn and Nicholas Harding’s Beach Life, both on display until November 22.
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