NEW + ORIGINAL WORK

A Polyvalent Exhibition and Edition
Art Rooms, Nicosia, Cyprus

 

NEW + ORIGINAL WORK marked a significant point in the recalibration of my practice — not as a retrospective, but as a living archive, a shuffled poetics of past and present. First exhibited at Art Rooms in Nicosia, Cyprus, in 2018, the exhibition staged three decades of work not through a chronology of achievements, but through a grammar of recurrence. It placed at its core a boxed edition of triadic poetry postcards — each one a conjunction of image and text, historical work and fresh utterance. These were not captions or documentation. They were artworks: portable, repeatable, reshufflable.

 

The exhibition resisted the traditional retrospective logic of fixity, hierarchy, and enclosure. Instead, it foregrounded multiplicity, movement, and the interplay between voice, image, and place. At the heart of the edition sat a new essay by Heather H. Yeung — itself distributed across the cards, its paragraphs embedded as fragments in the visual field. This allowed the essay to be read in any order, reordered by the hand of the viewer-reader, and carried away.

The triadic poetry — once termed ‘vishaiku’ in earlier institutional publicity — is more usefully understood in this context as part of a longer heritage: Druidic triads, ritual utterance, topogrammatical incantation. These are not aphorisms but invocations, binding image and site and language into a practice of public thinking.

 

Other works included:

  • SPEECH AT THE GRAVE SIDE OF KARL MARX : SPEECH AT THE BIRTH OF THE DAUGHTER
    A textual performance that overlays Engels' eulogy with the arrival of my daughter. A crossing of public and personal ritual; a fusion of histories lived and remembered.

detail of SPEECH AT THE GRAVE SIDE OF KARL MARX : SPEECH AT THE BIRTH OF THE DAUGHTER, Friedrich Engels/Tim Brennan, March 17th 1883/2018. Single page graveyard poem available as a PDF downlaod via the Editions Store

  • GALLIPOLI MIRROR
    A poem-film collaboration with poet Heather H. Yeung, conceived in 2016 while we were based in New Zealand and Turkey. The work draws together the landscapes and legacies of the Dardanelles campaign, mapping sites of memorial and mourning through the poetic form. It operates as transmission — not illustration — and critiques the aestheticisation of war remembrance.

Gallipoli Mirror video, 13mins 11secs, Tim Brennan & Heather H. Yeung, 2017

 

NEW + ORIGINAL WORK stands as both a survey and a proposition. It reflects my shift toward a distributive, post-institutional, and polyvalent form of visibility. The exhibition became a place not of display, but of encounter — where the postcard, the fieldnote, the poetic shard took precedence over the framed work or wall text.

This project also prefigures the logic of Treatise 1, and can be understood as a precursor to the distributed, field-based, and publishing-oriented practice that now defines my work.

The edition of 100 boxed postcard sets (ISBN 978-9925-7410-2-1), signed and numbered, is available by request from the Editions Store.

Create Your Own Website With Webador