Brennan, Tim
Tim Brennan is a Northern artist based in the UK. Brennan studied Fine Art at The Slade School of Fine Art and Public History and Historiography at Ruskin College Oxford.
His practice is rooted in fine art approaches to making, being polyvalent and not limited to one mode of production. His concerns lie in various intersections of fields, surfacing as enquiry into mobilities, poetry in the expanded field, the artwork as museum, and feral publishing. He is perhaps best known for his reinvention of the guided walk form which he terms manoeuvres and which he began in the early 1990s. Much of his work involves an emphasis on performativity and performance. Brennan founded the W.A.L.K. research centre at the University of Sunderland and is a co-founder of the Spineless Wonders network.
He has exhibited internationally since 1986, including: British Council Plovidiv (BG in 1989), Centre Regionale de la Photographie, France (1991), The National Maritime Museum (2002), the British Museum (2003) and Museum of Contemporary Art, Begrade (2005). In 2006 his substantial body of work consisting of photographs, paintings, found objects and artifacts entitled The NORTH toured the UK. In 2008 he was the first visual artist to gain a residency with The Mass Observation Archive, a project supported by Photoworks and surfaced as a monograph, ‘English Anxieties’ and an exhibition that toured Hansard Gallery, Ffotogallery, and Turner House Gallery (UK). More recently he performed at Performance Arcade (NZ in 2017), solo exhibited new video work, photographs, and text pieces at New Art Space, Nicosia (2018), performed text works at Museum Quartier, Vienna (2018 & 2019) and presented a web-based work for Athens Digital Art Festival and Primarola Festival (GR and both in 2022). His work with the forms of the guided-walk and guidebooks have been represented at the 54th Venice Biennale (2011) and have been instrumental in the emergence of art walking as a field.
Brennan was Professor of Art at Massey University Aotearoa/New Zealand (2016), and Professor of Art, Head of Department Art & Performance, Manchester School of Art, Manchester Metropolitan University, UK (2017-2023).