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

Brent Biennial 25: FIRE Ritual

When
26 Sep – 12 Oct
12–8pm

Where
Metroland Cultures
91 Kilburn Square,
London,
NW6 6PS

Free to all! For event and workshop bookings book via eventbrite here

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
Moving-Image (4k 28:30) with Installation (Map art, Diorama sculptures, Botanical Landscapes, Fictional Tools), Zine, and a WebXR mini-tour

On display daily at Metroland Cultures
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 and sculptural installation envisions a society reconstructed from this regenerative substance, one that carries the traces of cellular memory.

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

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

This is a project based on a direct quote from Samuel Becket’s 1953 novel The Unnamable. These seven words are in fact the last words of the book. In the artist’s view, this statement perfectly reflects our state of mind in today’s dark times. Most of us are probably pessimistic intellectually, but still optimistic, at least with our will. Because we have no choice.

Its public presentation is an act of resistance, an act of hope, inviting the audience to use these words as a hopeful lament.

Events Programme   

Friday 26 September – FIRE Ritual Launch at Metroland Cultures

11:00 – 13:00 | I Can’t Go On, I’ll Go On  – Activation walk from Kensal Green to Kilburn (meet at Kensal Green Station)

Please join us on a walk from Kensal Green to Kilburn, following the ancient route for pilgrims, traders and explorers, and marking locations of community interest – where we will share this proclamation with the public as a collective gesture of resistance and hope.

 
13:00 – 16:00 | O: Ladle Me – 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. Presented by Sue Man and Capri Jiang, artists rooted in hospitality and food heritage, this event explores food as both medium and language in artistic expression. Through their practice, fire, food, and storytelling merge—transforming the simple act of feeding into a shared ritual of remembrance, care, and healing.  

16:00 – 18:00 | Grieving Kilburn – 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 | Evening Celebration with K2K Radio
As part of the official launch of the Brent Biennial’s FIRE Ritual, K2K Radio collaborates with Metroland Studios to create an evening of rhythms, food, and drink, featuring local DJs and a special fundraiser for Macmillan Cancer Support. Step inside the K2K Radio studio for a live show exploring grief, remembrance, and music as medicine. Come for the energy, stay for the connection — and be part of a night where creativity meets care.

Saturday 27 September at Metroland Cultures

13:00 – 14:00 | Growler’s Kilburn Stroll – Dee Mulrooney
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 –  Annie Jael Kwan + Sun Park 

This gathering calls on participants who feel the fires within and around us. We hold a space where you are invited to enter into conversation with the archetypes of flame—rage and grief, renewal and creation—and allow them to move through our bodies, our stories, and our collective imagination. We will approach tarot as a spiritual technology and storytelling to spark new associations and collective insights. Working with archetypes from the major arcana, we will light up connections to ancestors and deities, and scribe new visions with free/collective writing. This is a circle for those who feel the rising heat—within the body, within the world—and long to transmute it. We gather not to extinguish the fire, but to learn how to tend it, honor it, and let it illuminate the path ahead.

Sunday 28 September at Metroland Cultures

14:00 – 16:00 | Deheat Mudmud – 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 | Embers of Light: Lumen Print Transfigurations – Xinyue Tao
This workshop explores transformation through the lumen print process—an alternative photographic technique where objects are placed on light-sensitive paper and exposed to sunlight, leaving ephemeral traces shaped by light and heat. Together we witness images appear, shift, and slowly fade. This impermanence becomes the essence of our ritual: a cycle of ignition, manifestation, disappearance, and renewal. What remains is not permanence, but resonance—an inner fire carried forward. We take our prints with us, allowing them to keep transforming, and continue the practice of presence, trust, and impermanence beyond the workshop.

Wednesday 1 October at Ambika P3 (35 Marylebone Rd, London NW1 5LS)

18:00 – 20:00 | Things Fall Apart – A talk by Alfredo Jaar, followed by Curing the World? Art as Change and Healing – a panel discussion with Alfredo Jaar, Abbas Zahedi and 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.

This event is hosted by CREAM, University of Westminster, for the Brent Biennial 2025.

About the artists

Abbas Zahedi is an artist whose practice blends sound, sculpture, performance, and social processes to explore memory, identity, and belonging. With a background in medicine from University College London and an MA from Central Saint Martins, Zahedi’s work engages with systems of care, thresholds of experience, and the creation of communal spaces for dialogue. His projects often interweave personal narratives with broader collective concerns, using sound and materiality as conduits for reflection and connection. Recent exhibitions include Tate Modern, CAPC, Bordeaux, and East Side Projects, Birmingham. In addition to his artistic practice, Zahedi collaborates with musicians, researchers, and institutions to develop interdisciplinary projects that explore the intersections of art, architecture, and sonic culture. His work has been recognised with awards such as the Stanley Picker Fellowship, 2024 and Frieze Artist Award, 2022.

Alfredo Jaar is an artist, architect, and filmmaker who lives and works in New York. His work has been shown extensively around the world. He has participated in the Biennales of Venice (1986, 2007, 2009, 2013), Sao Paulo (1987, 1989, 2010, 2021), and Gwangju (1995, 2000, 2020) as well as Documenta in Kassel (1987, 2002). The artist has realized more than seventy five public interventions around the world. Over eighty monographic publications have been published about his work. His work can be found in most major museum collections worldwide. He received the Hiroshima Art Prize in 2018 and the Hasselblad Award in 2020. This year he was selected as the recipient of the 2025 Edward MacDowell Medal.

Annie Jael Kwan centres diasporic feminist/queer lived experiences and practices, collective knowledge and radical spirituality as part of her Phd research. She instigates and curates the Radical Spiritual Collective, an intersectional multi-cosmological gathering of alternative knowledge and belief systems, intended towards nurturing middle-aged sisterhood and spiritual justice. Her alt-personas of Raving Auntie, High Priestess and oneiromancer are sometimes glimpsed at pasar malams, tiny coastal towns and dimly lit rooftops.

Capri Jiang is a participatory artist, community event coordinator, and researcher who leverages art and design as transformative tools to communicate, support communities, and challenge prevailing narratives. Her practice focuses on creative interventions in social justice issues, particularly the right to food and gentrification, expressed through multidisciplinary mediums such as zine creation, short films, art workshops and curatorial projects. In collaboration with Granville Community Kitchen, Capri developed a series of participatory research projects to respond to local food insecurity and celebrate diverse food heritage in South Kilburn while nurturing collective action around the right to food. For Capri, food serves as a universal and inclusive medium, deeply tied to culture, land, human rights, and self-expression, that grounds and shapes her socially engaged artistic practice.

Caren Owen is a passionate creative producer and One Spirit interfaith minister. She is committed to community, creative and ceremonial endeavours which cultivate inclusive spaces for connection, care, celebration and wellbeing. Her previous work includes leadership roles at South Kilburn Studios, founding K2K Radio and producing Kilburn Festival.

Dee Mulrooney is a multi-disciplinary artist whose practice encompasses painting, drawing, film, storytelling, and performance. Her work is profoundly shaped by her lived experience as a woman, with recurring themes of identity, exile, class, and displacement. Dee addresses complex subjects such as abuse, loss, and trauma, employing art as a medium for transformation and reclamation. By highlighting underrepresented female experiences, her projects foster collective reflection and healing within the context of intersectional feminist discourse. Dee’s alter ego, Growler, is an 85-year-old vulva and liminal space holder who navigates themes of sexuality, religion, and sexual violence. Drawing on elemental intuitive practices, Growler embodies the archetype of the sacred clown, using her arresting theatrical rituals to challenge societal norms and articulate truths that are often left unspoken. 

Orin Chung is a London-based floral and botanical designer and the founder of Oxygen Flower Studio. Known for his transformative installations, Orin reimagines spaces through carefully curated floral compositions that often feel like spatial teleportation, turning environments into ethereal, immersive experiences. Orin’s background in fashion design informs his practice in floral artistry, bringing meticulous craftsmanship, conceptual thinking, and a hands-on experimentation approach to colour, form, material, and texture. This experience has also refined his eye for composition and structure, enabling him to explore new techniques and creative possibilities in his floral work. In 2023, Orin relocated to the UK from Hong Kong, where his East Asian identity and diasporic experiences in urban cityscapes inspired his exploration of new themes. His diasporic perspective informs a critical engagement with nature’s role in cultural identity and spatial storytelling, expanding the discourse on the human-plant relationship.

Sue Man (b. Stockholm, Sweden) is a London-based artist of Chinese heritage. Through a participatory, multidisciplinary approach, she investigates cultural heritage, memory, and the intricate weave of belonging and identity. Working across mixed media—including ephemera, textiles, clay, sculpture, and food—she creates spaces where stories are shared, resilience is nurtured, and futures are imagined. As an artist, cultural programmer, and community builder, Sue mobilises intergenerational narratives through materiality and conversation, repurposing her family trade in hospitality to connect communities and amplify voices and stories often overlooked. Since 2009, she has led creative projects with institutions such as the Southbank Centre and Museum of the Home, alongside grassroots organisations. Alongside her collaborative work, Sue continues her studio practice, exploring domestic rituals, memory, and food as a site of cultural expression and community activism, creating work that reflects both personal and collective histories in immersive, engaging experiences.

Sun Park makes, writes and works as a cultural worker in London. She is currently interested in gossip, friendship, and risk while studying topics like Cosmotechnics, Asian Futurism, and feminist remembering with positive obsession. Lately, the Hanged Man card has been returning to her, and she hopes to write about it in relation to Fred Moten’s idea of nonperformance. She is learning and resting with the Asian Feminist Studio for Art and Research (AFSAR) and Carefuffle Working Group.

Yarli Allison is a Canadian-born, Hong Kongese art-worker based in London with an interdisciplinary approach traversing sculpture, XR, film, drawings, tattooing, and performances. Yarli graduated with an MFA first-class honour from The Slade School of Fine Art. Yarli’s works have been exhibited at Tai Kwun Contemporary Museum, Barbican Centre, Institute of Contemporary Arts: ICA London, and the V&A Museum. Recent project grants were awarded to Yarli by Arts Council England, the Canadian Council for the Arts, and the Hong Kong Arts Development Council. Through their work, Yarli explores themes of digital humanity along with belongings, decolonisation, feminist futures, biotech ethics and queer solar punk scenarios.

Xinyue Tao is a London-based artist whose practice explores the subjective perception of time and space through self-identity, memory, and the unconscious. Guided by intuition, her work is primarily rooted in photography, while also extending into performance, installation, and experimental forms. She engages deeply with darkroom printing and alternative photographic processes, integrating light-sensitive materials and slow, embodied methods into her image-making. Tao also embraces collaboration as a working method, co-creating interdisciplinary works and initiating community-based workshops that foster dialogue, shared experiences, and connections. She is dedicated to creating fields of resonance where deep connections can emerge through artistic engagement.

FIRE Ritual is presented by the Brent Biennial, with the support of Arts Council England, Brent Council, Canada Council for the Arts, Granville Community Kitchen, Hong Kong Arts Development Council, K2K Radio, Kilburn Square Housing Co-op, Something Human, University of Westminster, and Wing Yip.

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