Brent Biennial 25: FIRE Ritual

The Brent Biennial FIRE Ritual is a programme engaging with the element of fire. 

Fire is a tool, both revered and feared. A glowing hearth calls us home, to safety and sustenance. Gentle embers create warmth, while a blazing flame provides illumination and force for change. Its power is exponential and the loss of its control threatens destruction. Fire symbolises the potential for creation and destruction. It challenges the notion that structures should last forever, and instead speaks to transferences of im/materiality across dimensions. 

FIRE Ritual takes place from 26 September to 12 October 2025, centring on transformation, loss, rage and regeneration. FIRE ignites and mutates, and this chapter of Brent Biennial explores how creation and destruction can forge new paths through collective acts of remembrance and transformation. Join us for exhibits, talks and events at Metroland Studios, Ambika P3 and more. 

The programme of activities include exhibited work, public performances, workshops and talks with leading artists and creative practitioners. 

For event and workshop bookings book via eventbrite here

Exhibition

In Petri Dishes We Sing 《 於培養皿內唱歌 》– Yarli Allison

On display daily at Metroland Studio
26 September – 12 October 2025

Through the lens of a stem cell clinic in the year 2135, In Petri Dishes We Sing envisions a world where embryonic stem cells (ESCs) become a raw, sustainable material that forms the very fabric of the city’s infrastructure. Inspired by MIT’s research on the Lemon Skin Chair and Yarli’s exploration of the healthcare system and gender health gaps, the film envisions a society reconstructed from this regenerative substance, one that carries the traces of cellular memory.

“What if women/uterus-carriers’ Embryonic stem cells (ESCs) are the solution to climate change and gender inequality, that this ‘raw sustainable material’ becomes so desirable that it takes over the world as our primary material?”

I Can’t Go On, I’ll Go On – Alfredo Jaar

On display outside Kensal Green station (639 Harrow Road, London, W10 4RA) and 147A Kilburn High Road (London, NW6 7HT)
22 September – 5 October 2025

Events Programme   

Friday 26 September – FIRE Ritual Launch at Metroland Studios

11:00 – 13:00 | Activation walk from Kensal Rise to Kilburn

13:00 – 16:00 | O: Ladle Me – ladle-making workshop by Sue Man + Capri Jiang

The ladle, often a quiet presence in the domestic sphere, is a vessel of nourishment and care—a simple tool that bridges hands, hearts, and histories. Inspired by the Shehuo 社火 (Community Fire) traditions of Northwest China, this ceremony transforms the ladle into a mask of meaning, a talisman imbued with protection, memory, and connection.

16:00 – 18:00 | Grieving Kilburn, a ritual ceremony and conversation led by Caren Owen

Following the autumn equinox and in these times of personal, collective and land grief, this regenerative session offers an open-hearted participatory ceremony that centres fire as an ally for death, grief and transformation. Led by local community producer and interfaith minister, Caren Owen, participants will be held in simple rituals that speak to all the elements and invite connection and healing. Bridging the gardens of Kilburn Square and Metroland Studios, this public session centres a co-created altar and is followed by space for conversation, rest and music.

18:00 – 20:00 | K2K Speakseasy + Party at Kilburn Square 

Saturday 27 September (Metroland Studios)

13:00 – 14:00 | Performance by Dee Mulroney 

Growler is Dee Mulrooney’s alter-ego and performance piece. She is an 85-year-old drum-banging shamanic vulva living in exile. Through storytelling, song, spoken word and comedy Growler takes audiences on a ritualistic, theatrical journey through grief, loss, exile and displacement. No stone is left unturned and no one is left behind on Growler’s quest to heal the past and help people to love the “eejit” out of themselves. With a tongue like a lash and a heart of gold, Growler is at the coal face, blazing the streets with her trolley and staff, remembering the everyday sacred. Growler will be coming to Kilburn to connect with the Holywell and remember the thousands of Irish ancestors who settled in the area. Beneath the concrete and cement the memory is held. 

 
14:30 – 17:00 | Tarot & Transformation Workshop with Annie Jael Kwan + Sun Park 

Sunday 28 September at Metroland Studios

14:00 – 16:00 | Deheat Mudmud – Workshop with Yarli Allison + Orin Chung

Artist Yarli Allison and botanical designer Orin Chung invites you to craft in “Deheat Mudmud”, a hands-on workshop that revives ancient plant-based healing methods in thinking about modern medicine approaches with future biotechnologies.

Drawing from practices of ‘Deep Medicine’ (Raj Patel and Rupa Marya) alongside Sino-botanical wisdom on addressing imbalances in the inner body like ‘heat toxins’ (Cantonese: 熱毒 Jit6 Duk6) and ‘damp-heat’ (濕熱 Sap1 Jit6), the artists invite you to restore the harmony of your full being: to connect symptoms as part of an interwoven web of identities, stories, people, non-humans, land, and environments while biotech advances. You are invited to craft wearable talismans, brew your restorative tea, sip to reset your nervous system.

16:00 – 18:00 | xx – Workshop with Xinyue Tao

Wednesday 1 October at Ambika P3

18:00 – 20:00 Curing the World? Art as Change and Healing

Things Fall Apart – A talk by Alfredo Jaar, followed by a panel discussion with Jaar, Abbas Zahedi, Yarli Allison, moderated by Annie Jael Kwan

The Brent Biennial 2025 FIRE Ritual asks: what if art could burn away indifference, cauterise wounds, and spark renewal in a world ablaze? We live amid inflammation and exhaustion—bodies, minds, and ecosystems scorched by injustice, overheated by grief. Yet in the embers and ashes, art offers not a salve of false comfort, but a vital force: reigniting, enlivening, repairing.

This gathering brings together Alfredo Jaar, Abbas Zahedi, and Yarli Allison, three artists who offer art as a living agent—not a passive reflection, but a fever, medicine, a call.

For more than forty years, Alfredo Jaar has worked at the fault lines of ethics and representation, asking how images and cultural gestures can cut through indifference, disrupt power, galvanise change, and demand empathy. Abbas Zahedi constructs resonant social architectures – part ritual, part encounter –  that pulse with collective breath, showing how art can hold fragility and translate it into forms of care. Yarli Allison crafts speculative worlds out of migration, queerness, biotech, and digital entanglement, where survival means weaving tenderness through precarity.

Together, they refuse the snake-oil fantasy of easy cures. Instead, they ask: can art’s true power lie in its ability to gather us, to slow us, to imagine otherwise?

This event is not a prescription. It is a provocation, a fire lit in common ground—inviting audiences to see care as resistance, healing as insurgency, and art as a force that might yet reshape the future.

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Annie Jael Kwan Curator of Brent Biennial 2025

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Water Divinations: Collective Enquiry

Part of a series of “divinations” that will inform the creation of the Brent Biennial 2025. A one-day programme structured around water, featuring workshops and collective imagining.

Earth Divinations: Collective Enquiry

Part of a series of “divinations” that will inform the creation of the Brent Biennial 2025. A one-day programme structured around earth, featuring talks, walks, workshops and collective imagining.