Programme
Rebecca Bellantoni
When
Brent Biennial 2022
8 July - 11 September 2022
Thursday – Sunday, 12 – 6pm
Where
Metroland Studio, Room 3
91 Kilburn Square
NW6 6PS
Wheelchair Accessible
Venue Location
YOU HAVE ANY PEACE FOR ME? C.R.Y
Artist Rebecca Bellantoni presents the second chapter of her ongoing trilogy project C.R.Y: Concrete Regenerative Yearnings, an exploration into the geographical landscapes, architectures, materials, people, spiritual lives and energetic leftovers of the city as a trigger for positive transformation and meditation. Working with the potentials and constraints of opacity through the use of the colour black and obscured lighting, C.R.Y is home for many works including moving image, performance, textile, writing and sculpture.
You have any peace for me? comprises a commissioned new film and installation that reflects on specific experiences of the hostile environment and the trauma it inflicts, alongside the dissolution of a community Bellantoni was a part of when growing up, who had embraced Rastafari as both a spiritual way of life and a political lens through which to view the world. In this work, Bellantoni celebrates the love and learning that can extend from being part of a community, whilst simultaneously considering the ways trauma can be held within it, focusing on both literal and symbolic journeys that can be taken towards individual healing and community regeneration.
You have any peace for me? points towards the many ways in which Black British people face enduring hostilities in the UK, whilst also highlighting how the children and grandchildren of past generations have been taught to learn and develop tools to navigate these hostile environments with mental, physical and spiritual resilience. Alongside the film and installation open and available to the general public, Bellantoni is working with a group of Brent-based health practitioners to provide various therapies for invited local guests to the exhibition, seeking to facilitate healing modalities that focus on the mind, the body and the spirit of a person.
Rebecca Bellantoni’s work mines everyday occurrences and abstracts them, with a focus on the lives of Black British people, particularly those living in cities. Through the lens of metaphysics, philosophy, spirituality and their own aesthetics, Bellantoni considers the concept of the accepted/expected ‘real’ and the experiential ‘real’; looking at how these removed borders may offer meditative experiences and portals to self, collective reasoning and healing thought. Bellantoni utilises materials that proliferate in everyday life, and works within contexts that are both familiar and unfamiliar, aiming to skew/reinterpret their meanings and any future encounters with those substances.
Recent work has been shown with/at Languid Hands, Rowdy SS, Adelaide Bannerman, Nora Swantje-Almes, Present Futures, Ravens Row, London, PUBLICs, Helsinki, Stroom Den Haag, The Hague and Palais de Tokyo, Paris.
Instagram: @rebecca.bellantoni
Access key: wheelchair accessible, audio-description tour (link below), subtitles (English)






Watch a live audio-description tour of the work:
Rebecca Bellantoni’s exhibition was commissioned as part of the Brent Biennial 2022, titled ‘In the House of my Love’. The second edition of the Biennial asked how, and why, the act of making home can be a form of resistance and survival within the context of hostile environments—including those of racism, homophobia, ableism, climate catastrophe and political austerity. The Brent Biennial 2022 was curated by Eliel Jones, in collaboration with a curatorial committee comprised of artists Adam Farah, Abbas Zahedi and Jamila Prowse. Find out more by visiting the Archive.
