Concerto for Antlerfolk
Brennan has been involved in performance art since the mid-1980s. Works are often durational, focusing the limitations of the body and offering up metaphors within the contexts of political repression, socio-political regulation, equality, diversity and inclusion.
photo credit: Alan Baker
Concerto for Antlerfolk
Gruppen (Tim Brennan & Dean Brannagan), AIR Gallery, Manchester, 2022
Concerto for Antlerfolk is a durational performance-ritual developed by artists Tim Brennan and Dean Brannagan (collectively, Gruppen). First performed at AIR Gallery in Manchester, the work unfolded over several hours — not as a spectacle, but as a living field of sonic and material attunement.
No stage. No programme. Just an open invitation to witness and to move through.
photo credit: Alan Baker
Using antler-shaped clay objects, ritual figurines, drum machines, and improvisational mark-making, the artists transformed the gallery into a resonant site — part cave, part score, part memory theatre. Viewers arrived and departed fluidly, some staying for minutes, others for hours, occasionally crossing into the performance field itself.
At the heart of the work was the antler: not as symbol, but as tuning device — an extension of attention. Like Joseph Beuys’s Celtic Symphony, the piece channeled a mythic undercurrent where sound, body, and object formed a temporary ecology of ritual. A suspended triangle, struck intermittently, acted as a sonic hinge, shifting the atmosphere like a bell between worlds.
This was not choreography, but listening-in-action. Each gesture — a mark, a breath, a tone — became part of an emergent score shaped by presence and response.
The “concerto” here is speculative, fugitive, and ancient. It hums with submerged histories — from the Mesolithic traces of Star Carr to the speculative ley lines of contemporary hauntology.
In this sense, Concerto for Antlerfolk is less a performance to be watched than a resonance to be entered — a tuning fork struck not just for sound, but for memory. It invites not spectatorship, but proximity. Not interpretation, but attunement. To enter the space is to step into a vibrational field where the familiar categories of music, drawing, sculpture, and ritual dissolve into something older, slower, and less nameable.
Here, antler and instrument are not props but conduits — tools for sensing the latent frequencies within a room, a body, a lineage. Actions unfold not in service of narrative but in service of presence. The piece proposes a kind of speculative archaeology: one that doesn't dig down, but listens across — to echoes, atmospheres, gestures. It understands that memory is not always linear, and that the past may sometimes arrive in the form of resonance before it arrives as image or word.
Like a struck bell continuing to vibrate long after the moment of contact, Concerto for Antlerfolk remains in the body of those who witnessed it — as signal, as shimmer, as subtle recalibration. It doesn’t ask to be understood. It asks to be remembered.
Clay antlers held to the temples
photo credit: Alan Baker
Resonant echoes -Striking the idiophone
photo credit: Alan Baker
photo credits: Alan Baker
Beneath the lingering hum of the idiophone, the space settled into a pulsing, low-frequency ritual. An impromptu altar emerged from the terrain of action — paper relics curled at the edges, pigment bruised into floor and wall, and the ever-present Antlerfolk fetishes watching, as ever, without eyes. The performers marked, echoed, listened. Clay frontlets and graphite gestures laid down a fragmentary liturgy. These images are not documentation but residue — what remains after the current passes through.
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