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Container or music series
Wroughtings
Wellington 2017
Tim Brennan
Wroughtings is a performance walk (or 'manoeuvre) through the city that seeks to promote critical reflection of the built environment through a work of imagination. It sequences a range of quotations, selected from a broad range of sources by the artist. These include modes of inscription that are already present within the built environment of Wellington and that define a route along the waterfront and into the heart of the city.
Since the early 1990’s Brennan’s practice and research into the politics of place has surfaced as performance, sculpture, photographs, painting, and writing. He was the first contemporary artist to develop a methodology for the guided walk as a discursive performance one that he terms the 'manoeuvre'. Each 'walk' involves the collision of quotations with stopping points (stations) along a predesigned route. This approach differs from the conventional guided tour, wrenching the participant/’percipient’ into new imaginative and socially charged perspectives of place.
Tim Brennan is an independent practitioner who has exhibited internationally for over 30 years. He is engaged in the notion of discursive practice through: performance, photography, sculpture, writing, drawing, painting, curating and teaching. Since the early 90’s he has developed approaches to art based on the journey (which he refers to as the manoeuvre). This work exists in a region between traditions of performance art, loco-description, history and journeying, and surfaces as an exponential mode of radical travel-writing. His recent journeys have developed older attitudes of ‘making art of the landscape’ to produce large-scale photographic works and miniature watercolours.
Brennan has been quoted as one of the most important practitioners to contribute to the social and political role of contemporary art and has been sited as developing and applying the concerns of minimalism, performance, land art and conceptualism within the social fabric.
