Thursday 8 August 2019, 7pm
Please note that this is a free event but there is a voluntary donation of £5 to raise funds for Headway East London.
Almost every Thursday for the past 20 years, Tony Brooks has produced a drawing. This exhibition presents a selection of the artist’s work since joining Headway East London in 1998. Curated by Zara Joan Miller, this retrospective will include works on paper alongside a video installation, projections, text-based pieces and a puppet, created by Brooks in 2017.
While autobiographical accounts, limericks and handwritten notes exist within Brooks’ portfolio, his drawings indicate a dialogue with a more private world. Men on horseback recur regularly within Brooks’ portfolio. There are also several men in wheelchairs and many winged creatures. Sitting, walking, galloping or taking flight — the various figures within Brooks’ work call into question ideas surrounding mobility, disability and somatic mastery, as well as the nature of self-portraiture.
Using the walls and windows of Cafe OTO, Brooks’ drawings will be given the space to exist together, in a single room — inviting the tying of various threads and themes across his work. Billy Steiger and Tom Wheatley will perform with Headway members Sue Talbot and Stuart Donaldson, inspired by songs Brooks’ listens to while drawing. Zara Miller will read a poem, created from the artist’s extensive written and autobiographical notes.
This event is a fundraiser with proceeds from tickets going to the charity Headway East London.
Original drawings and prints will be on sale and available to order from the artist.
Billy Steiger was born in Howth on the 16th December, 1986. Now he plays the violin.
“Then he sat down by a pond and began to play a tune. As he played, the most extraordinary thing happened. One by one the fish in the pond began to jump out and fly about in the air. And what is more, they were all different colours and they were singing to the music.”
Patrick, Quentin Blake.
https://billysteiger.bandcamp.com/
Tom Wheatley (b. 1991, London) is a composer and improviser, operating in the fractious and fertile interfaces of acoustic and digital sound, extending instruments via technique and technology. Beginning with the double bass, he also works with synthetic sound and processing, and plays a wide selection of instruments in collaboration with a broad range of performers and instrumentalists, from long-standing duos to one-off improvisations.
His score as composer for Giulio Bertelli’s striking debut feature film Agon (2025) was released in 2026 on PAN records. Winner of the FIPRESCI Prize (International Federation of Film Critics), the film is a triptych of three female athletes preparing for a fictional Olympic games. Straddling fiction and documentary, the score reflects the film’s hyper-focus on the gesture of sports performances, each protagonist mirrored by an instrumentalist: fencing with cellist Ute Kanngiesser; rifle shooting with saxophonist Jean-Luc Guionnet, and judo with percussionist Seijiro Murayama, with his bandmate Grundik Kasyansky on electronics and Harry Gorskí-Brown on bagpipes completing the chamber group.
Prior to Agon he worked on scores with award-winning composer Daniel Blumberg, including the Oscar and BAFTA winning score for Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist (2024), as well as director Mona Fastvold’s The World to Come (2020), and The Testament of Ann Lee (2025), for which he played viola da gamba and other early European string instruments.
His active projects as a musician centre around the duo Tennota with Grundik Kasyansky, formed in 2019. Once described as ‘half techno, half free jazz’, the project is about the generative friction between physical and digital arenas. They take primary materials – gut strings, sine waves, tree sap, feedback – and engage them with contemporary technologies, towards a taut and nebulous rhythmic language. They have released albums on Accidental Meetings, Cafe Oto’s TakuRoku, and most recently a collaboration with artist and musician Rosa Anschútz on Meakusma.
Other projects include an ongoing collaboration with Italian fashion project GR10K. Among their collaborations was Stringent Manners, a performance at Auditorium San Fedele for the launch of GR10K SS25: Nine Pounds of Dead Landscape. Wheatley worked on musical direction, performance, and co-composition with Andrea Slaviero, choreographing students from the Milan Conservatory as both models and instrumentalists for this ambitious six hour piece, which harnessed the students boredom and frustration to shape the performance.
Growing up in a multi-generational family of musicians, he is a seasoned instrumentalist. Over the years, he has collaborated and performed with stalwarts and luminaries of contemporary music, including Eddie Prévost, Billy Steiger, Ute Kanngiesser, Adam Christensen, Jim White, Okkyung Lee, Evan Parker, Ilan Volkov, Steve Noble, Sachiko M, and John Edwards, with releases on OtoRoku, Matchless and Earshots.
Zara Joan Miller is an artist working across poetry, performance and film. Her work often plays with movement and sound as a way of reimagining a body’s rhythm. She is the author of BLUE MONDAY (JOAN Publishing, 2022), which was also released as a duo LP with cellist Ute Kanngießer on Reading Group in 2023.
Her work has recently been presented at Les Atelier Claus, TACO!, Barbican Centre, Maximilian William Gallery, Horse Hospital, In Vitro, Default Den Haag and and has appeared in motor dance journal, Fieldnotes, Hotel, Another Gaze and Worms Magazine.
