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Exhibit from NEW + ORIGINAL WORK

Exhibit from NEW + ORIGINAL WORK

Professor of Art's international exhibition introduces new visual poetry practice

31 July 2018

Tim Brennan's NEW + ORIGINAL WORK opens in Cyprus in August

The first exhibition featuring ‘Vishaiku’, contemporary artist and Professor of Art Tim Brennan’s unique visual and poetry practice, is to open.  

NEW + ORIGINAL WORK, which opens at Art Rooms in Nicosia, Cyprus in August, is the first stage of an international tour exhibiting Brennan’s work over the last 30 years which ranges across object, image, performance, text, publication and curation.

His ‘Vishaiku’ practice blends poetry (the haiku) with visual form (images taken from across the years of Brennan’s work) as a unique form of archival documentation that reinvents the convention of the artist retrospective.

Prof. Brennan has produced Vishaikus to chronicle observations in his daily life and as a means of staging his archives. They begin life as social media posts, many using images taken while out for a walk or run, while some utilise the artist’s long-term use of the appropriated image and manipulated fragment. More than 80 of these works will be displayed in Art Rooms.

Professor Tim Brennan, Head of the Department of Art at Manchester School of Art, Manchester Metropolitan University, said: “As an artist I have never limited myself to one way of working. In contrast I find making art is at its most rewarding when I am pushing at its edges to make new relations with other fields.

“I have always written, and text has always played a significant role in my work. I was brought up in a household of poets and artists and exploring the fusion of the visual with that of the literary seems a natural avenue for me.

“This approach in its latest form enables me to combine images (from past performances, sculptures, artworks, things that catch my interest in my daily life) with new writing. The result is an ongoing chronicle of my world.”

Prof. Brennan has exhibited internationally over the last 30 years, with work being shown at the 50th and 54th Venice Biennales, Interzone Performance Biennale in Quebec Canada and AV Festival in Newcastle. He has also contributed to over 15 monograph publications and multiple academic journals, while in 2007 he was shortlisted for the UK's Northern Arts Prize.

NEW + ORIGINAL WORK will display more of his work with poetry, and its crossing points with politics and life. These include:

  • SPEECH AT THE GRAVE SIDE OF KARL MARX SPEECH AT THE BIRTH OF THE DAUGHTER - This work takes a doubled starting-point in a text by Engels, and an event in Brennan’s own life. Again, the work here foregrounds Brennan’s concern with spatio-temporal mobility, and the productive juxtaposition of different voices, visions, points of view.
  • GALLIPOLI MIRROR – a poem-film collaboration with poet and author Heather H. Yeung, conceived as a mode of communication and protest in 2016 when the artists were living and working in New Zealand and Turkey. It takes as its material the Dardanelles campaign of WW1, the uncannily similar topographies of Tarakena Bay (NZ) and Canakkale/Anzac Bay (Turkey), the Ataturk Memorial and the Çanakkale Martyrs Memorial and George Gordon, Lord Byron's poem of 1816, 'Darkness'.

The exhibition is the first in what Professor Brennan plans to be an internationally developing tour. It is accompanied by a unique artist edition that involves a sequence of Vishaiku postcards that bear a new critical essay by Heather H. Yeung. 

NEW + ORIGINAL WORK and original work is kindly supported by Art Rooms, ARUCAD and Manchester School of Art at Manchester Metropolitan University.