The Brent Biennial AIR Ritual is a programme engaging with the element of air. 

Brent Biennial 25: AIR Ritual

When
7–24 October 2025

Where
University of Westminster, Harrow Campus, Watford Rd, Northwick Park Roundabout, Harrow HA1 3TP

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

Exhibitions at University of Westminster Harrow Campus

The Unshakable Destiny (2021-2025) – Nikki Lam (world premiere)
The Unshakable Destiny (2021-2025) is a five-year modular moving image project on the spectres of Hong Kong. An exploration of memory, site and cinema, the trilogy contemplates art-making in the diaspora, as a witness to the slippery political context of a homeland from afar. Expansive in format and storytelling, _2101 (2021), Reprise / Release (2023) and Retrograde (2025) present a necessarily incomplete story of post-2019 Hong Kong diaspora. Always on the periphery, the trilogy shapeshifts as its homeland transforms, moving from a disappearing culture to its haunting and cyclical returns.

Our Shrines – David Blandy
David Blandy’s presentation incorporates ShrineShare, a project conceived and made with Malaysian artists and writers Sharon Chin and Zedeck Siew, and Our Place, No Place, a game made in collaboration with Jo Lindsey Walton where we imagine the complexities of a better future together. The project helps us to consider speculative worlding and emancipatory gaming. Our Place, No Place is a tabletop role-playing game where draw a map and then step into the lives of characters who inhabit it. Our space, 200 years in the future, is no longer abstract, but an imaginatively lived reality. The game insists we will survive these traumas, but asks what will life then be like, in this more collaborative world? Alongside this, Shrineshare asks “What do we hold sacred in times of crisis?”  ShrineShare is a collaborative project that works with artists from the UK & Malaysia to share their visions of sacred shrines, be they ancient, personal, or imagined. The stamp-art folio project asked sixteen artists from Malaysia, Thailand, the UK, and the US to think about shrines: datuk kongs; sacred wells; flowers left at places of tragedy; Geocities fansites. ShrineShare is supported through British Council’s  Connections Through Culture grants programme. Creating new arts & cultural partnerships between East Asia & the UK.

A Blade of Grass Behind the Ear – Adeline Kueh

A Blade of Grass Behind the Ear explores rituals rooted in Sarawak’s indigenous knowledge, such as placing a blade of grass behind the ear as a sign of respect for nature and the unseen. The project examines “air” through the metaphor of trade winds—symbols of movement, history, and connection, recalling ancient routes like the Silk and Spice Routes. Drawing on personal experiences between Singapore and Sarawak, the work reflects on home, belonging, and kinship. Through craft, storytelling, and symbols like the rosette, the project weaves together themes of memory and legacy, with air as a metaphor for continuity and intergenerational exchange.

A Mobile Library for Collective Knowledge – Quek Jia Qi + Aaron Lim

A Mobile Library for Collective Knowledge is a cross-cultural installation and activation programme exploring how knowledge circulates, evolves, and connects. Inspired by the shared ways of knowing that emerge from communities and the recognition that everyone carries embodied knowledge, the project invites contributions from Singapore and the UK feed into a living collection that grows and shifts with each response. Activated through workshops and participatory encounters, the installation invites visitors to experiment, co-create, and reflect, shaping knowledge as relational, embodied, and continually transformed.

Myco (re)mediation – Alexa Seligman

Myco (re)mediation (2025) by Alexa Seligman stages a machinic encounter mediated by both mycelial and artificial intelligences. At its centre is a Martha Tent, a climate-controlled chamber where mushrooms grow and fruit in real time. An AI interface displays speculative text, live-streamed as if from the perspective of the fungi. Inspired by mycoremediation – working with fungi to detoxify polluted environments – the work experiments with non-extractive forms of care and inter-reliance between humans, technology, and the more-than-human world.

Effects – Joe Grahame

The artwork draws upon research into biodiversity surrounding the hospital. It explores little known areas of nature in the local environment including the neighbouring University of Westminster gardens. Effects provides reflections on how being in and near nature can help with healing processes. It aims to bring that experience into hospital space which, by necessity, might otherwise be perceived as functional, clinical and sterile. This installation utilises the hospital environment’s glass panels to glimpse outside, thinking about the relationship between the interior and exterior, both architecturally and physiologically.

Structures of Touch – Laura Johanna König

The collection of 3D textured wall pieces in glazed porcelain reveals different notions of touch, sensation, and support; materialised in medical and narrative interpretations. It displays the cell structures in human skin and documents the fossilisation of touch in abstract shapes, and with the slow disappearance of a block of soap. 

Fragile Like Life (2025) – Yuki Nakamura

These fragile porcelain footballs, all at different stages of deflation, exist within the strenuous tension between the human world and the fragile earth we live in. Like globes, each ball represents a journey, fragile like life itself, destined to be dispersed throughout the world, traveling its own course, uniting viewers and speaking across cultures. Created by casting actual deflated and worn-out footballs in porcelain, these pieces embody evolving tactile effects on objects and a delicate porcelain skin that preserves dents, scars, and textures. Some were found abandoned on beaches, others softened and deformed through years of contact with countless hands and feet. While their original function is lost, their meaning as sculptural forms is expanded.

Events Programme: Friday 17 Oct

Various spaces, University of Westminster Harrow Campus

10:30am – 3:00pm (with a break for lunch) | Breathing Space: Art, Wellbeing, and Collective Care, facilitated by The People Speak, for the Arts, Culture & Communication Research Group

Join us for an open and dynamic dialogue exploring the vital intersections of art, wellbeing, and care, as part of the Brent Biennale AIR Ritual programme. This special session brings together researchers from Arts, Communication and Culture (ACC) and the Creative Health Initiative at the University of Westminster, alongside artists and members of Northwick Park Hospital, to share experiences and collectively imagine new possibilities for creative health.

In collaboration with The People Speak, using their engaging participatory format Talkaoke, everyone is invited to take a seat at the table. Through conversation, storytelling, and speculative thinking, we will explore how art can nurture wellbeing, transform care environments, and build meaningful connections between individuals, institutions, and communities.

2:00pm – 4:00pm | Into the cave – ACC + Brent Biennial artist talk and screenings with Jesse Jones
Join artist Jesse Jones for an in-depth talk tracing two decades of her film practice, from Spectre in the Sphere (2008) to her recent commission The White Cave for the Singapore Biennial. Through selected clips, discussion, and a special test screening of new work in progress. Jones will map the key principles guiding her films: feminist histories and suppressed voices, with subjects that range from communist spectres, witches and oysters . This event offers a rare insight into her evolving practice and future directions. 

4:00pm – 5.30pm | Asia Forum: panel conversations with Biennial artist Nikki Lam + panel conversation with Jia Qi Quek, Aaron Lim and Adeline Kueh, in conversation with Annie Jael Kwan and John Tain

Saturday 18 October

Various spaces, University of Westminster Harrow Campus

11.00am – 1:00pm | Wondering Minds Live programme of artist talks, panel conversations & screenings

12:00 – 3:00pm | Hack The World Around You: Intro to physical computing – Workshop by Creative Media Arts staff and students 

Explore the world of physical computing in this hands-on workshop delivered by students and staff from the BA Creative Media Arts at the University of Westminster. In this workshop you will learn how to turn everyday objects and materials — like fruit, foil, or even paint — into interactive controllers for triggering sounds, games, or animations. No prior coding or electronics experience is needed—just creativity and a willingness to experiment. The workshop introduces key concepts of interactivity, giving you practical insight into how technology can be embedded in the physical world. You’ll have the chance to design and build your own interactive project, combining problem-solving, creativity, and technical skills.

12:00 – 3:00pm | Cameraless Animation Workshop – Jacob Watkinson and
CMA

In this hands-on, cameraless animation workshop, participants will be introduced to key Structuralist films before exploring the creative possibilities of 16mm film. You’ll have the opportunity to paint, scratch, and draw directly onto celluloid, working with both archival home movies as well as clear film leader for direct animation. The session will culminate in a live projection, showcasing the unique short works created during the workshop. No prior experience with 16mm film is required—this workshop is designed to provide an accessible foundation for anyone interested in experimenting with film as a creative medium.

Monday 20 October 

University of Westminster Harrow Campus

1:00pm – 3:00pm | Crafting circles: kinning, care and resilience –  Workshop with Adeline Kueh

How might we connect through craft and ritual? Perhaps through love languages that sit at the intersection of care, making, and storytelling. As I consider the home as one of many vessels, I turn to rituals such as the making of the rosette, which functions as both leitmotif and visual metaphor. This symbol holds layers of matrilineal stories and intergenerational knowledge—intimately private, yet resonating as forms of public remembrance. Participants will gather to learn how to sew the fabric rosettes while sharing stories about rituals within the home, and their recollections of craft practices.

Wednesday 22 October

University of Westminster Harrow Campus

1:00pm – 3:00pm | Living Knowledge: Exploring Community-Led Ways of Knowing, Learning, and Being – Workshop with Quek Jia Qi and Aaron Lim
Can community-led knowledge exchange inspire new ways of knowing, learning and being? Drawing on her experiences in Singapore and the UK, artist and educator Quek Jia Qi shares an artistic and pedagogical practice that reimagines how, where, and with whom we learn. In collaboration with spatial designer Aaron Lim, the activated installation encourages movement, experimentation, and shared discovery. Exploring the knowledge, skills, and perspectives they carry, participants will take part in a process of experimentation, sharing, and prototyping, contributing their creation to the mobile library. Each contribution flows into the evolving installation, forming a living collection of ideas that interweaves creativity, collaboration, and cross-cultural exchange. Step in, experiment, and join in shaping new possibilities for collective learning.

Friday 24 October

University of Westminster Harrow Campus

10:00am – 6:00pm | Print Gully zine fair
Print Gully is a frenetic zine fair where nothing goes as planned. Drawing inspiration from the chaos of shopping plazas, with dangling wires, faulty plumbing, backstreets stacked with newsprint, and makeshift printing processes.

A selection of works from Print Gully Zine Fair and Brent Biennial 2025 artists will be on display in the library. 

11:00am – 12:30pm | Play Through This – Panel discussion about speculative worlding and emancipatory gaming with David Blandy and panellists 

In this discussion we will consider speculative worlding and emancipatory gaming, considering the possibilities and limits of tabletop roleplay for solidarity and societal change. David and his fellow panelists (TBC) will look at the history of gaming and resistance, covering, amongst others, the work of Avery Alder, Jay Dragon, Soul Muppet and Zedeck Siew. 

12.30pm – 1.30pm | Our Place, No Place – David Blandy gaming workshop

In this session, we will play Our Place, No Place, a game made in collaboration with Jo Lindsey Walton, we imagine the complexities of a better future together. Our Place, No Place is a tabletop role-playing game where we create a shared world, drawing a map and defining its landscapes, then step into the lives of characters who inhabit it. As we navigate a year in this imagined space, unexpected local events shape our stories and a community emerges through play. Our space, 200 years in the future, is no longer an abstract concept, but an imaginatively lived reality. The work insists that we will survive these traumas, but asks what will life then be like, in this different, sustainable, more collaborative world? No prior experience of gaming is necessary to play.

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