Brent Biennial 25: EARTH Ritual

The Brent Biennial EARTH Ritual is a programme engaging with the element of earth.

A planet amidst galaxies, and yet a world within a single grain. A home amidst multiple ecologies. Our lands are contoured with the scars of war, territoriality and extractivism. The earth holds and archives. From the earth we came and will learn to return to rest.

The Earth Ritual gathers artists and communities at ACAVA studios and Barham Park to remember and dream of how our histories and stories are all traced across the land, of the possibilities of new human and more-than-human cosmologies, in communal rest and recuperation.

The programme of activities include an exhibition, sculptural interventions, curatorial and artist talks, a field walk, and a yoga nidra performance workshop.

Programme

Thursday 24 July 

4:00–5:00pm Intervention: Akira Takaishi 

6:00–7:00pm Talk: Curator Annie Jael Kwan with Akira Takaishi, Nick Murray and Forms of Circulation (Paul Stewart and Sarah Perks).

Friday 25 July 

11:00am–1:00 pm ACAVA Talks: Playing it by ear, with Dr Darren Chetty, creating artist teacher collaborations  INFO AND BOOKING

2:00–4:00 pm Listening Trees: Sound Ecologies, a workshop led by Forms of Circulations

4:30–5:30 pm Intervention: Akira Takaishi 

Saturday 26 July

11:30am–1:00 pm walking in your footsteps with Alisa Oleva

1:00–1:45pm Lunch Break (Visitors are encouraged to bring a packed picnic lunch that could be enjoyed in Barham Park)

2:30–4:30 pm Border rituals: leaking bodies, homes, and transnational collaborations: Panel discussion and screening with performingborders

4:30–6:30 pm Slumber for survival with Goddess Nidra: Performance lecture & workshop with Lynn Lu

Return to Dreamphone by Nick Murray, Place Far Away from Anyone or Anywhere: Stone Mazes by Akira Takaishi, and Forms of Circulation #1 by Forms of Circulation will be on view daily between 25 July–1 August 11:00am –6:00 pm.

On the 24 July the ACAVA galleries will be open between 2:00–8:00 pm. 

EARTH Ritual Information about contributions 

Lynn Lu’s Slumber for survival with Goddess Nidra comprises a performance lecture and workshop. The performance lecture will look at sleep through the lens of sleep science, mythology, culture, and politics. And the workshop will be an invitation to partake in collective rest.

Sleep deficiency as a public health crisis affecting over 60% of the world’s population. Insufficient sleep is terrible for our bodies, minds, and spirits. But why are we sleeping so badly, and what can we do about it? The terms sleep deprivation and insomnia are often used interchangeably, but they are actually distinct from each other. Sleep deprivation is when we have the ability to sleep, but lack the opportunity to sleep. Sleep deprivation disproportionately affects socioeconomically disadvantaged groups, including minoritized racial and ethnic populations. Insomnia is when we have the opportunity to sleep, but lack the ability to sleep. Insomnia is caused by factors such as genetics, stress, illness, major life changes, menopausal hormonal fluctuations, and/or poor sleep hygiene. 

In Hindu mythology, Nidra Devi is the goddess of respite and slumber. Named for the divine personification of sleep, yoga nidra is a meditative practice of deep rest. The restorative power of sleep often manifests in our fairytales at pivotal points to bring about symbolic transformation or renewal. Likewise, writer Haytham El-Wardany asserts that because sleep carries within itself the potential for awakening and starting anew, it is crucial to radical political action and agency – despite outwardly being the most unproductive of human states. At the same time, the recent Tang ping (“lie flat”) movement is the outright refusal by young Chinese adults to be productive in the face of an inhuman work culture. While Tang ping describes a personal rejection of societal pressures to overwork and over-achieve, activist Tricia Hersey positions rest as a racial and social justice issue. Her organisation, The Nap Ministry, seeks to de-stigmatise self-care and sleep, advocating for rest as a form of healing from trauma, and calling for a collective resistance against exploitative late-capitalist culture that ties our worth to our production.

The workshop will comprise walking meditation, group reading, guided self-acupressure, progressive muscle relaxation, and yoga nidra. Whether our sleep is imperilled by the neoliberal imperative to be productive or adverse life events and circumstances, improving our rest is imperative for our collective wellbeing and resilience. Slumber for survival with Goddess Nidra will help.

Please note: If the weather permits, the workshop will also extend to the outside spaces of Barham Park. Participants are invited to bring along yoga mats, picnic blankets and towels.

Return to Dreamphone by Nick Murray is a work-in-progress that gently examines collective action through speculative fiction. Rooted in systems of care and collective reimagining, Return to Dreamphone asks inhabitants what a community archive can offer, and how a community can steer it into a caring future. 

Taking the Wembley Brook floodplain as a repeating motif, the works exhibited hint at alternative communal archiving practices, questioning how they can resist and thrive in an increasingly commodified digital-physical world. Archives serve as maps for collective movement and Return to Dreamphone asks how, as playful readers and as careful stewards, we might find a clearer path towards an inclusive common ground.

The works displayed are an in-progress document of Nick’s ongoing project mapping the shifting landscape along the River Brent. This chapter follows Wembley Brook as it passes underneath Barham Park and meets Brent at Stonebridge Park. The river becomes an allegorical path— it meanders, obscuring the search for a utopia that can be glimpsed, but remains just out of reach. 

With the river at its heart, Return to Dreamphone invites audiences to hold both the potential of collective action and also the care needed for archiving in each hand. These forces exist as equal velocities, pushing in opposite directions from the present. 

For the Brent Biennial, Return to Dreamphone has been split into two chapters, Water Slides and The Bottleneck. Showing at Barham Park is Water Slides, a poetic travelogue told through meandering imagery and text. An indistinct horizon line circles the audience, giving glimpses of landscape that spans a shifting past and an uncertain future. Observers are invited to become agents in our collective vision by changing the field of view. In this way the work changes over the span of the exhibition, each participant refines the map towards a collective ideal. 

Alisa Oleva’s walking in your footsteps: invites participants to take a walk with her in Barham Park. In her words :  I  invite you to take a walk with me in this park. To pay attention to your footsteps and the desire lines you make and follow. I invite you to walk in the footsteps of all those who walked this land before you across generations and seasons. What other lands and homes do we bring with us as we walk here in Barham park today? And who lives and is at home in this place and who is passing through never to arrive? 

For some, this is the local park they visit every day; for others, it may be their first time here. Together we will listen and touch this place with our hands, ears and footsteps. We will explore its edges and its pathways with counter mapping, slow walking and writing prompts. We will observe how this place imprints on us and how we leave a trace of our dreams and footsteps. 

You do not need anything specific for the workshop and all materials will be provided. Try to travel light. The walk will go in any weather so bring umbrellas/raincoats/sunscreens/water – whatever you will need on that day depending on the weather and your needs.

In response to Lynn Lu’s contribution to Earth Ritual, performingborders screening panel discussion delves into its archive to share a series of performances to camera that expand the Brent Biennial’s conversation around borders and homes, bodily and material structures, crossing and transition, and coexistence between human and nonhuman worlds.

Across its platform, performingborders has unearthed three performances that speak to the artist as an individual in relation with their bodies and surrounding watery and earthy spaces as well as to their work within shifting, multiplying borders—both physical and digital—that define and disrupt connections.

Lynn Lu’s Amnion thinks through water as a medium that connects all hydrogeological and meteorological bodies and living creatures. The work expands on the significant water loss in menopausal bodies, our human affinity to whales – the only other species that undergoes the climacteric and lives a long post-reproductive life, and the enduring biological enigma that is menopause. Layered voices narrate text excerpts from philosopher Astrida Neimanis’ and writer Darcey Steinke’s ideas exploring the leakiness of borders between our bodies and our environment, and between human and cetacean, as well as the fallacies and fears that continue to surround bodies transitioning from a state of fertility to one of barrenness that affects more than half the world’s population.

Tara Fathei’s Borderline Dialogue is a container for different understandings and experiences of borders and a coming together of seven actions for public space performed in Australia, Hong Kong, Iran, Ukraine, USA, Chile and Mexico. These performative actions are the result of a dialogue between Tara Fatehi and her collaborators who have each contributed with their unique approaches towards the performative potentials of borders. From lived experiences of border crossing to ephemeral markings and abstract interpretations, this work encompasses personal boundaries (Afshin Chizari), the Russia-Ukraine conflict and its consequences in the border city of Mariupol’ (Alisa Oleva), engagements with arbitrary borders in urban space (Daniela Contreras López), private choreographies and temporary borders marked at each step (Bettina Fung), touching and the erasure of borders of our bodies (Laura Ríos), invisible and obsolete borders encountered in everyday life (Emily Elizabeth Sweeney) and the paradox of being simultaneously on two sides of the border of work/play, art/not-art, night/day (Malcolm Whittaker). 

Jade Montserrat’s RE:seeding, in correspondence suggests drawing as the connector between ourselves and the earth. Developed with film-makers Webb-Ellis, in this performance to camera the artist seeks to visualise these communications and exchanges of energy –  the lines she draws, and consider what stewarding our spaces means by starting from our own home. Filmed during the COVID-19 pandemic, RE:seeding, in correspondence researches topics on ownership, body and land, explored through extending on the artist’s central idea that drawing is a mode of being and operating – which allows further exploration of the question: What does it mean to survey and reclaim ‘environments’, our relationship to space, and where are potentials for reclamation or belongings? 

The screening will be followed by a conversation with curator Annie Jael Kwan, artist Lynn Lu, and Alesandra Cianetti from performingborders. Attendees will receive hand-made pamphlets with additional written materials from our platform, responding to questions of embodied territoriality, communities across borders and transnational solidarities.

Place Far Away from Anyone or Anywhere is a project by Akira Takaishi in which small-scale land art sculptures made from natural materials are presented outdoors, while transforming the interior of ACAVA Studio into an installation of spray paintings that incorporate architectural elements. In both spaces, stone artworks are scattered, each engraved with spiral-shaped labyrinthine patterns.

Working on a modest scale and employing simple forms, the project traces subtle commonalities among different materials and techniques.

Can we find our way through the tangled maze of territorial disputes, differing interpretations of history, and intergroup communication—without reaching a dead end?

Forms of Circulations – Listening Trees: Sound Ecologies

The workshop Listening Trees: Sound Ecologies explores embodied and collective knowledge through audible and non-verbal communication. Participants will collaborate with Paul Stewart and Sarah Perks on field recording to create an audio response to their film Forms of Circulation and explore rhythm, melody and sonics.

Developed out of workshops with staff at the advanced biosciences research facility National Horizons Centre, Forms of Circulation explores the wider impact of routine machine processes on their human and non-human recipients. Captured on 16mm colour film, and also shot on location at Teesmouth National Nature Reserve, the film mediates on the labour involved including investigating deadly mouth rot in seal pups and fruit flies’ role in modelling for Parkinson’s disease cures.

EARTH Ritual Artists

Forms of Circulation is a collaboration between Sarah Perks and Paul Stewart. FoC’s practice, often workshop and film-based, brings together considerations of engagement, power and knowledge. Participatory projects have explored nature recovery through meditation and spatial practice through to using generative AI to question how collections can dream. Their films have been selected at multiple international festivals including BFI London Film Festival (2024), with recent residencies, presentations and workshops including 0-ea, Yokosuka/Tokyo, Japan (2024), Cartwright Hall, Bradford (2025) and MIT, Cambridge, USA (2025). 

Lynn Lu is a visual artist from Singapore and lives and works between Singapore and London. Her research-led multidisciplinary practice emerges from her interests in context and site specificity, participation and collaboration, and the poetics of absurdity. Her interests range from specific lived experiences and intimacy between strangers, to empathy as artistic means to create resonance. Her recent research revolves around the figure of the Crone, and investigates female aging through creative practice, to broaden and deepen the ways we collectively understand and experience menopause.

Lynn exhibits and performs extensively worldwide. Selected venues include : Whitechapel Gallery (2025), National Gallery Singapore (2022), SFMOMA (2021), Staatlichen Kunstsammlungen Dresden (2019), Framer Framed (2018), Science Gallery London (2017), Saatchi Gallery (2017), Palais de Tokyo (2015), The Barbican (2015), Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts (2013), Tate Modern (2010), Beijing 798 Art Zone (2009), and Singapore Art Museum (2007). She is an Associate Lecturer at Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts, and Associate Artist at ]performance s p a c e [.

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.

Alisa Oleva is a walking artist based in London who works within the spaces and streets of the city, exploring the politics of public space, how the city moves and how we move it, urban choreography and urban archaeology, traces and surfaces, borders and inventories, intervals and silences, passages and cracks. Her projects have taken the form of one-to-one and collective performances, walking scores, personal and intimate encounters, gatherings, parkour sessions, walkshops, soundwalks, and audiowalks.

Alisa holds a BA and MA from The Courtauld Institute of Art and an MA in Performance from Goldsmiths. She is currently doing a fully funded practice-based PhD at the University of East London.

performingborders is a collectively run platform for artistic research and creation, focused on notions and lived experiences of intersectional borders through international live art and performance practices. Drawing from the knowledge shared by the contributors of the platform, performingborders has over the years created a digital and live tapestry of interconnected, transnational experiments through interviews, artist commissions,open calls, publications, residencies, workshops, conversations, events, newsletters, and performingbordersLIVE. All our work is freely accessible online. Co-run by Alessandra Cianetti, Xavier de Sousa and Anahí Saravia Herrera, in collaboration with guest curators, thinkers, artists, activists and researchers.

Akira Takaishi (born 1985, Japan; based in Japan) creates land art, installations, and implicit paintings that depict distorted spaces through twisted perspectives. His work explores hole-like structures as convoluted reflections of societal frameworks and individual identities—spaces that at once invite refuge and, in the same gesture, tighten into traps. Takaishi has exhibited in numerous solo and group exhibitions. In 2023, he held a solo show, Place Far Away from Anyone or Anywhere, at CSA Space in Vancouver, followed by Hole Chambers at Art Center Ongoing in Tokyo in 2024. In 2021, he also curated the group exhibition Subterraneans at Gallery αM in Tokyo.

EARTH venue

EARTH Ritual is presented by the Brent Biennial, in partnership with ACAVA, with the support of Arts Council England, Arts Council Tokyo, Lu Foundation, The Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation, National Arts Council Singapore and the Toshiaki Ogasawara Memorial Foundation.

ACAVA is a leading arts and education charity, providing affordable creative workspace and pioneering community arts programmes for 50 years. ACAVA’s Barham Park Studios in Wembley provides 31 artist studios within Georgian Mock Tudor buildings, hosting the ACAVA Hosts Residency and Flourish programme, and offering the Barham Park Community Studio for hire in a historic parkland setting. A pioneer of delivering socially engaged arts programmes, we bring artists and communities together to create pathways to employment, job creation, and transformative health and wellbeing outcomes.

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