Michael Cook - Conditioned
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Michael Cook – Conditioned
Perimeter Editions 2025 ISBN 9781922545466 Acqn 37198
Pb 23x29cm 144pp col ills £39
For Michael Cook, photography is a means of reimagining and rewriting. His language is
embedded in questions of what was, what is, what might have been, and what could be.
Conditioned, the Bidjara artist's first book for Perimeter Editions, draws upon key series from the
last decade to prise open histories and imaginaries that simmer between Indigenous and
European experiences, perspectives, and consciousness.
Cook works in an almost cinematic mode, using the camera as an elaborate choreographic and
narrative device, meticulously layering and editing his images from countless shoots on location.
The resulting images are quietly virtuosic. Soft, painterly tones and fastidious compositional
details provide a filmic backdrop for historical pathos, speculative futures, imaginary leaps, and
unrestrained what-ifs. They veer between the sumptuous and the stark, the historical and the
speculative, the political and the playful.
Amidst Conditioned's lushly printed plates - which are punctuated by abstracted texts and
phraseology - Cook invites us on a kaleidoscopic trip through Indigenous parliamentary
takeovers, luxury European shopping sprees, autobiographic asides, and colonial inversions -
where Aboriginal characters assume the role of alien invaders, and supersized Australian wildlife
wreak havoc upon iconic London streets. It is a journey of reflection, resistance, and freewheeling
imagination.
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