2 October 2025
BOOK NOW: 17–24 Oct AIR Ritual at University of Westminster, Harrow Campus
The Brent Biennial AIR Ritual is a programme engaging with the element of air.
Brent Biennial 25: AIR Ritual
When
7–24 October 2025, OPEN Mon-Sat 12-6PM
Where
University of Westminster, Harrow Campus, Watford Rd, Northwick Park Roundabout, Harrow HA1 3TP
For event and workshop bookings book via eventbrite here
For exhibition tickets book via eventbrite here
Exhibitions at University of Westminster Harrow Campus
17 – 24 October 2025:
The Unshakable Destiny Trilogy (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, _0121 (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 (2024-2025) – 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 Artists include: Amze Emmons, Arif Rafhan, Bethany Balan, Betti Stong, David Blandy, Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, Daniel Locke, Hardeep Pandhal, Jamie Oon Muxian, Jesse Joy, John Powell-Jones, Nadhir Nor, Petra Szemán, Ruangtup Kaeokamechun, Rupa Subramaniam & Shaifuddin Mamat (Poodien). 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 (2023-2025) – 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 (2025) – 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 (2025) – 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.
The Spectre and the Sphere (2008) – Jesse Jones
Jesse Jones’ The Spectre and the Sphere is a sound installation from 2008. The work features “The Internationale” an international anthem that has been adopted as the anthem of various communist, anarchist, socialist, and social democratic movements eerily played on the electronic instrument, the theremin. This soundtrack by Lydia Kavina, the celebrated musical protégée and great-niece of the inventor Leon Theremin, will be installed at Westminster University as an unannounced intervention into the sonic ecology of the space. The Spectre and the Sphere evokes the spectres of ideology and amplifies residual voices that haunt the cultural vessels of history. Playing this Marxist anthem through the building aims to blend these histories with everyday student life in an attempt to echo and evoke possible futures as well as histories of collectivity.
Exhibitions at Northwick Park Hospital
17 – 24 October 2025:
Effects (2025) – 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 (2024-2025) – 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 October
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 Communication and Culture Research Community (ACC)
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.
1:00pm – 3:00pm | From Flat to Phat inflatables event and workshop with Fine Art Mixed Media (FAMM)
Take a moment to explore what happens to light, ephemeral materials when air becomes the main actant. Ask questions of materials: How large can they go – how small and light could they be – can they float can they fly can they hold heavy objects? If lines are drawn on the flat materials what happens to lines when they become air filled objects. Can these potential objects be ‘performed’ to fill them with air?
2:00pm – 4:00pm | ACC x Brent Biennial Guest Lecture: Into the Cave – artist talk and screenings with artist filmmaker 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 and discussion 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.
Launched in 2021, the Asia Forum for the Contemporary Art of Global Asia/s is a platform envisioned for discourse surrounding experimental art practices and research brings awareness to and contextualises the fast-developing artistic practices and contemporary geo-politics of Asia/s. Asia Forum council members John Tain and Annie Jael Kwan will be joined by researchers Dr Eva Li and Professor May Adadol Ingawanij, in conversation with Biennial artists Nikki Lam, Adeline Kueh, Quek Jia Qi and Aaron Lim. Together, they will first reflect on Lam’s exploration of the context of Hong Kong in relation to aesthetic and diaspora identity, futuring nostalgia and geopolitical narratives; the second session invites the audience to engage with Kueh, Quek and Lim’s invitational methodologies that centre knowledge exchange systems and relational intimacies.
Saturday 18 October
Various spaces, University of Westminster Harrow Campus
12:00pm – 3:00pm | Hack The World Around You: Intro to physical computing – workshop with Creative Media Arts (CMA) 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.
12:00pm – 3:00pm | Cameraless Animation – workshop with Jacob Watkinson
(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.
2:00pm – 4:00pm | UNFOLD – a screening programme and discussion presented by Wondering Minds
Wondering CIC, in partnership with WCL Mind, is proud to announce the first public screenings of UNFOLD, a groundbreaking collaborative filmmaking project exploring mental health through lived experience storytelling and biographical film as a tool for therapy. Running over 14 weeks between March and June 2025, UNFOLD culminated in 11 filmmakers each creating a deeply personal autobiographical short film. Across 18 sessions, participants developed filmmaking skills while using creativity as a therapeutic outlet. The films reflect resilience and identity offering fresh perspectives on mental health. The project is part of Wondering CIC’s regenerative model, where participants are supported to return the following year to mentor others and access freelance opportunities — creating sustainable pathways into the creative industries.
Monday 20 October
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
1:00pm – 3:00pm | Living Knowledge: Exploring Community-Led Ways of Knowing, Learning, and Being – workshop with Quek Jia Qi & 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
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 proceses.
“Gully” (from Hindi/Urdu: गली / گلی) means alleyway or side street. It’s often linked to grassroots, street-level culture like gully rap or gully cricket, and evokes a raw, local energy.
The zine fair gathers a wide range of makers spanning publishing collectives, independent artists, illustrators, writers, and experimental storytellers. From Less Than 500 Press and Silly Dogs Brunch Club, who celebrate DIY publishing and small press culture, to Print Collective and Beware! The Zine, who merge printmaking and community media, the event showcases the diversity of contemporary self-publishing. Artists like Tania Ali, Ahlam Ahmadi, Studio by Wings, and Pam Kaur Gibbons use zines as tools for cultural reclamation, identity, and care, while Zine Mela extends this ethos through a South Asian diasporic lens. Visual makers such as Jess Dempsey, Stefan Alexander, and Rosa Monsoon blend collage, ceramics, and illustration to explore the poetic, the playful, and the intimate. Liyaan Khoso, Shangomola Edunjobi, and Yarli Allison bring multidisciplinary and narrative-driven practices rooted in performance, comics, and digital art, while Blaft Publications and David Blandy expand zine culture into realms of global pulp, speculative fiction, and tabletop storytelling. From whimsical everyday reflections by Gazette Girlie to politically resonant practices by Becky Lyon and Lucia Morciano, the fair celebrates zine-making as both an art form and a mode of resistance, creating a site where personal stories, radical publishing, and collective imagination meet.
A selection of works from Print Gully Zine Fair and Brent Biennial 2025 artists will be on display in the library.
1:30pm – 2:30pm | Refreshments and Tour, hosted by the London North West University Healthcare NHS Trust
11:00am – 12:30pm | Our Place, No Place – workshop with David Blandy
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.
12:30pm – 1:30pm | Play through this – panel discussion with David Blandy, Samuel Clarice Mui Shen Ern, Eryk Sawicki and Laurie O’Connel
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 will look at the history of gaming and resistance, covering, amongst others, the work of Avery Alder, Jay Dragon, Soul Muppet and Zedeck Siew.
Samuel Clarice Mui Shen Ern is a play designer and tech artist from Malaysia who create multimodal games and interactive installations about everyday moments and extraordinary worlds. Eryk Sawicki is “a pierogi-core Polish grafik dezajner creativ producer obsessed with paper and the old-school internet. Here’s what I’m up to: If you know what OSR TTRPGs are, you’re my kinda person. If you need advice about graphic design, printing, shipping or retail, get in touch. I run Peregrine Coast Press, a boutique tabletop RPG retailer, distributor, and fulfilment house. We make sad gay games. It’s our thing. I’m the operations manager at SoulMuppet.” Laurie O’Connel is a writer, journalist and political organiser. His RPG writing can be found at twelvepinspress.com. His political and cultural writing can be found at marxist.com and communist.red
2:30pm – 6:00pm | Print, Refusal, and the Radical Imagination – Print Gully panel with R. T. Samuel, Sold Out Publishing and The Mollusc Dimension, chaired by Arsalan Isa Print has always leaked beyond control: smuggled, handmade, passed from hand to hand. This panel brings together R. T. Samuel (The Blaft Book of Anti-Caste SF), Sold Out Publishing, and The Mollusc Dimension (The Weird & Wonderful Surviveries of Squid Horse) to explore how radical print cultures reshape collective imagination. From small presses to speculative fiction, they’ll discuss how publishing can act as a form of refusal, breaking with the mainstream and opening up new, unruly worlds on paper and beyond.
Bakhtawer Haider and Betty Brunfaut are Creative Directors at Sold Out Publishing and co-founders of Plan B. Bakhtawer’s work is rooted in decolonial theory and the expansion of visual cultures within branding. Betty’s practice revolves around collaboration, inclusive pedagogy, and environmental issues. R. T. Samuel is an editor, researcher and independent cultural producer working between London and New Delhi. He commissioned and co-edited ‘The Blaft Book of Anti-Caste SF’, which was helmed by a viral fundraiser that made it the 2nd most successful Indian publishing campaign in Kickstarter history. The Mollusc Dimension (he/him) is a neurodivergent, multidisciplinary artist whose colourful graphic memoir “The Weird & Wonderful Surviveries of Squid Horse” explores mental health, grief and growth from the perspective of a British-Chinese, trans-masculine, non binary creative.
Brent Biennial 25: FIRE Ritual
Happening 26 Sept – 12 Oct the Brent Biennial FIRE Ritual is a two-week programme engaging with the element of FIRE.
Brent Biennial 2025: Bones, stones and calling the four elements
The third edition of the Brent Biennial, Bones, stones and calling the four elements, will present workshops, talks, performance and exhibition by 21 artists and community organisers.