Brent Biennial 25: WATER Ritual

The Brent Biennial WATER Ritual is a one-day programme engaging with the element of water. Organised with the Wembley Sailing Club, the day will be held at the Welsh Harp, Brent Reservoir. 

The programme of activities include taster sailing lessons, power boat storytelling runs, pop-up installations, workshops, a barbecue, performances, and a performance as tribute to Brent’s waters.

Programme

10:00 am – 3:00pm Sailing Tours and Power Boat Runs 

11:00am 28.0000° N, 45.0000° W (TIDAL ARCHIVE) Tea tasting and poetry reading workshop with artist Ocean Baulcombe-Toppin 

2:00 – 6:00pm Forista ‘soil tasting’ menu sessions with Becky Lyon 

2:00 – 3:30pm The Bottleneck workshop with Nick Murray 

3:30 pm 28.0000° N, 45.0000° W (TIDAL ARCHIVE) Poetry reading workshop with artist Ocean Baulcombe-Toppin 

5:00 – 5:30pm Performance All That Burnt All That Glow devised by Youngsook Choi for the Brent Reservoir. Performers : Darius Hulme and Ayse Roza.

5:30 – 7:00pm Music programme by guest curator, A—Z (Anne Duffau) featuring two live ambient soundscapes responding to the theme of water by Gisou Golshani and utopian_realism.

Pop up installations 28.0000° N, 45.0000° W (TIDAL ARCHIVE) developed by Ocean Baulcombe-Toppin and Forista by Becky Lyon will be presented alongside their workshops.

A Guided Visualisation: From land to sea to land by Marie Kølbæk Iversen and Harun Morrison will be available to listen to throughout the day.

Food will be served with an evening barbecue, and a paying canteen will be open during the day. 

WATER Ritual Artists and Projects 

Water is critical for life; we are water. Water dissolves and absolves. Water is an archive. Water remembers, sustains and purifies. Its tides and turns bring flows and exchanges across the world, while helping our communities survive and thrive. With this gathering of artists, practitioners and communities living and working with water, we listen deeply to allow the surfacing of its histories, the pooling of our grief, towards the hope of a great shared undrowning. 

WATER Ritual forms part of the programme for Brent Biennial 2025. Titled Bones, stones, and calling the four elements seeks to invoke a communal spirit of gathering and imagining. Between June to October 2025 four ‘rituals’, WATER, EARTH, FIRE and AIR will unfold at four Brent sites – a public reservoir, a park, an old medical facility and a university campus. Located in the north and south of the borough— Harrow, Wembley and Kilburn— the ‘rituals’ will feature 28 artists presenting workshops, talks, performance and exhibition.

Forista is an experimental concept cafe by artist Becky Lyon inviting guests to connect with neighbourhood and planetary soils through sipping, munching and sniffing. 

This yummy art experience unearths the sociality of soil, surfaces its teachings and indulges in its multi-elemental nature through a ‘soil tasting’ menu connecting flavour to place, aroma with earthly health and nourishment with community. 

Through special guest ‘blends’, illuminating tasting notes and joy for the tummy, Forista offers a moment of the remarkable and ritualistic in everyday actions amidst systems that would otherwise sever and dominate our relationship to the land and each other.

Launching at the Brent Biennial 2025, connecting with edible, olfactory and tactile earthly materials becomes a method of finding a shared palette across the vibrant and diverse diaspora of the borough whilst honouring the importance of conviviality, food culture and grassroots growing in the city as forms of solidarity and resistance.

28.0000° N, 45.0000° W (TIDAL ARCHIVE) presented by Ocean Baulcombe-Toppin is an installation of new works exploring transatlantic flows of energy and material. A tide of matter washes ashore as herbal liquidities. Contained and preserved in vessels, this material draws on the knowledge of Afro-spiritual bush tea practices and the teachings of herbalist Karen M. Rose whose practice of plant medicine and community therapy is influenced by African, Caribbean, and Latin American traditions. Held within these vessels are herbs, corals, rocks, gems, and other gathered fragments, drifting between the sacred, the geological, and the incidental.

The installation moves through ideas relating to diasporic identity, spiritual ecology, and speculative systems of care. Collecting and assembling become methods of forging connections, tracing lineage, and enacting reclamation through gestures of identification and symbolic association. 

Hibiscus blooms in Jamaica and is steeped into sorrel. Okra seeds, hidden, once smuggled from West Africa to Barbados. Over an ocean, St Lucian sea moss travels to the UK annually as nourishment and commodity. These botanical carriers move with memory, holding stories of migration, survival, and renewal. Their presence calls forth embodied knowledge and sensory communion.

An activation of 28.0000° N, 45.0000° W (TIDAL ARCHIVE), features a reading drawn from research on pools and flows, alongside a tea offering inspired by Afro-spiritual bush tea practices and the teachings of herbalist Karen M. Rose, whose work in plant medicine and community therapy is rooted in African, Caribbean, and Latin American traditions.

All That Burnt All That Glow by Youngsook Choi commemorates ecological loss through devising a healing ritual for Brent Reservoir. The reservoir was originally built to supply water to the Grand Union Canal when it played a major transport route for fossil fuels mined from North England. Now surrounded by green paths, the reservoir is home to sailing communities. Sailing, as a means of water navigation, is closely connected to colonial expeditions and conquests. The diverse cultural heritage of the Brent population emanated from this legacy. All That Burnt All That Glow weaves these historical legacies by engaging sailors in the water-bound performance. It involves

deep listening to the pain of geological fleshing-out and labouring bodies, morning voices for remembrance and healing, and smoke bombs set by sailors for sharing the sense of climate emergency, all through the trembling swelling scarred hydroscape of the Brent Reservoir.

A Guided Visualisation: From land to sea to land is a text by Marie Kølbæk Iversen and Harun Morrison. Presented here as a guided visualisation through text and sound invites the listener to transform into a watery being, accompanied by a soundscape of field recordings and abstract sounds. 

A Music programme by guest curator, A- – -Z (Anne Duffau) features two live ambient soundscapes responding to the theme of water by Gisou Golshani and utopian_realism.

Anne Duffau is a cultural producer, researcher, and founder of A—Z, an exploratory/nomadic curatorial platform. A—Z aims to open up to audiences by sharing discursive practices in order to challenge preconceived ideas about race, gender identities and so-called history in terms of power relationships. She has worked with PAF Olomouc since 2017, programming screenings and exhibitions. She co-funded and programmed the collectives: Transmissions.tv and Décalé. She is a Tutor at the Royal College of Art’s Contemporary Art Practice Programme and works as a freelance producer/researcher for Somerset House Studios. She produces monthly shows on Resonance FM and stegi.radio and live music under Alpha through several projects and collaborations (MAENADS, Polisonics, The New Adolescents). Her latest project was hosted at Matt’s Gallery in 2024 and is an ongoing series titled: Always Coming Home.

utopian_realism is a research-driven music project that originates from a fascination with the aesthetics and communities revolving around internet-native music genres and explores concepts of nostalgia cycles, controlled escapism, commodified utopian narratives and collapsing myths of progress.

The Venue

Thank you to the Wembley Sailing Club, Welsh Harp Sailing Association and Welsh Harp Open Space who are generously hosting the first of our collective enquiries.

The Welsh Harp Sailing Association includes the Wembley Sailing Club, Sea Cadets, Welsh Harp Sailing Club and the Phoenix Canoe and Outdoor Club, which are located around the Brent Reservoir, alongside the Welsh Harp Open Space.

The Brent Reservoir and Open Space is a Site of Special Scientific Interest, with the open water and associated habitats supporting an unusually large selection of wetland birds and plants for an inner city reservoir.

About the artists

Becky Lyon is an English-Jamaican artist and researcher from London. Her practice is committed to recalibrating relationships to nature and strategising more liveable worlds. She’s interested in sensory and bodily knowledges as a way of reclaiming our relationship to place and resisting harmful power dynamics. Her work takes the form of tactile objects, hand-made moving image, sensory installations, audio experiments and publications. She has exhibited in London, Berlin and Seoul and she has collaborated with organisations like Camden Art Centre, The Science Gallery, Radar Loughborough, London Festival of Architecture, Natural England and The Barbican. She has received awards from Jerwood Arts, The Elephant Trust and Metroland Cultures. She runs Ground Provisions, a ‘schooled-by-the-forest’ for adults and The Department of Artecology, a space for transdisciplinary conversations about transforming the conservation sector.  She has an MA Art & Science, MA Art & Ecology and is currently researching for her PhD, “Performing objects, tactile data, sense-ative documents and feelwork: touch as method for critical ecological stewardship in England” at Goldsmiths University. She is a volunteer Ranger for London National Park City where she supports grassroots activity, invites critical engagement with nature through art and is directly involved in conservation activities, particularly across Barnet, Brent and Harrow. 

Ocean Baulcombe-Toppin is an artist practicing in solace and connection. Through seen and unseen methods of communication, she explores memory, sensorial affect, and reclamation. Working with installation, sculpture, and nuanced interactions, she crafts with found objects, ephemera, language, solar energy, and moon water. 

She has recently exhibited at Chapter Arts Centre, Cardiff (2024); Sherbet Green, London (2024); Neven Gallery, London (2024); Metroland Cultures, London (2023); G31, Somerset House, London (2022); Harlesden High Street, London (2022); and South London Gallery (2020). Recent projects and performative gestures have taken place with iniva, London (2024/5); Cell Project Space, London (2024); and Nottingham Contemporary (2023).

Youngsook Choi is an artist/researcher with a PhD in human geography. Under the umbrella theme of political spirituality, her performances and multi-faceted installations explore intimate aesthetics of solidarity building and collective healing. 

Grief has been the focus of Youngsook’s recent practice, posing collective grief as the process of socio-political autopsy upon certain types of death and environmental destruction. Not This Future (2020), commemorating the Essex 39 incident rooted in the Formosa Disaster; Book of Loss (2022), intervention performance grieving seven lost glaciers; In Every Bite of the Emperor (2021-ongoing/long-term), the transnational weaving of neo-colonial narratives around damaged ecosystems and broken communities are in tandem with this inquiry. As an extension of the ecological grief project, Youngsook has been exploring the idea of eco-literacy, attempting to overcome anthropocentric intelligence, and the concept of a living memorial, engaging the interspecies collaboration in commemoration making as the counter to the human-centred didactic phallic sculptural forms.

Various institutions have supported Youngsook’s works. Amongst them are Arts Catalyst, Asia-Art-Activism, Barbican Centre, Camden Arts Centre, Coventry Biennial 2021, Estuary Festival, FACT Liverpool, Flat Time House, GOSH Arts, Heart of Glass, Liverpool Biennial 2021, Milton Keynes Arts Centre, Milton Keynes Islamic Arts and Culture, Nottingham

Contemporary, S1 Artspace, Up Projects, We Live Here in the UK; ARKO Art Center, Seoul Mediacity Biennale 2023, Seoul Museum of Art, The Book Society in Korea; Documenta 15, Kunsthalle am Hamburger Platz in Germany; British Council, Gerimis in Malaysia; and Nextdoor ARI in Australia.

Nick Murray is a game-maker, composer and artist making interactive sonic and narrative work focusing on loss and digital cultures. This often takes the form of games, interactive poetry and performance. Nick is Lead producer for Now Play This at Somerset House, Director of Playing Poetry and associate producer with Penned in the Margins.

In 2023 Nick was selected as part of Film London’s Lodestars cohort, celebrating innovative film and game-makers across the capital. From September 2024 Nick is the ACAVA Artist in Residence at Barham Park.

Harun Morrison is an artist and writer based in London and an associate artist with Greenpeace UK on the project Bad Taste. This summer he is in a two person show at Somerset House Studios project space G31 alongside Appau Jnr Boakye-Yiadom. His forthcoming novel, The Escape Artist will be published by Book Works. Recent group exhibitions include Sonic Acts 2024: The Spell of The Sensuous, Amsterdam, Chronic Hunger / Chronic Desire in Timișoara, Romania and BALATORIUM Disturbed Waters, in Veszprém, Hungary as part of the European Capital of Culture 2023 programme and Storm Warning: What does climate change mean for coastal communities? at Focal Point / Newlyn Art Gallery & The Exchange, UK. Recent solo exhibitions include, Dolphin Head Mountain at the Horniman Museum, London (2022 -23), Mark The Spark at Nieuwe Vide in Haarlem, Netherlands (2022) and Experiments with Everyday Objects, Eastside Projects, Birmingham, (2021). Harun is currently co-developing community gardens in Merseyside for Bootle Library and Mind Sheffield, a mental health support service, as part of the Arts Catalyst research project, Emergent Ecologies. @harunishere www.harunmorrison.net

Gisou Golshani is a London-based artist from Iran. She performs rituals of belonging and resistance through sound art, performance, and poetic chants. Her work explores fictioning, hauntology and speculative world-building to reflect on issues related to land, liberation and collective healing. 

Her recent exhibitions and performances include: MANIFEST:IO X IKLECTIK (London) Mimosa House (London) Bayt AlMamzar (Dubai) Iklectik Artlab (London), Deptford X festival (London), Emergency Live Art festival (Manchester) Diasporas Now UK tour (Hull) and New Art Exchange (Nottingham, UK). She is regularly invited to take over radio shows with experimental mixes, including Radio Alhara’s Sonic Liberation Front worldwide radio takeover (September 2022), to bring attention to the Jina revolution in Iran. She took part in Disturbance, an experimental residency for queer performance and video artists at Ugly Duck in London, first as an artist (November 2022) and then as a jury (April 2024). In July 2023, she was part of Lost and Found’s East African Soul Train residency, with showcases in London, Gaborone and Bangalore. 

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