Brent Biennial 2025 : EARTH Ritual Events 24 July

The Brent Biennial EARTH Ritual comprises an exhibition and 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.

ARTWORKS

Return to Dreamphone by Nick Murray, Place Far Away from Anyone or Anywhere: Stone Mazes by Akira Takaishi, and Forms of Circulation #1 by Paul Stewart and Sarah Perks will be on view daily to the public between:

24 July, 2:00 – 8:00 pm

25 July – 1 August, 11:00 – 6:00 pm

PROGRAMME

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

6:00 pm – 7:00 pm Talk: Curator Annie Jael Kwan with Akira Takaishi, Nick Murray, Paul Stewart and Sarah Perks

ABOUT

Place Far Away from Anyone or Anywhere: Stone Mazes 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?

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.

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.

Forms of Circulation #1 (2023)` by Sarah Perks and Paul Stewart

16mm colour |00:13:12

From mechanical processes of lab experiments to the rhythm of seals in the estuary, Forms of Circulation tracks the non-human bodies and their recipients of scientific bioscience research and its earthly impacts. Shot on location at the National Horizon Centre and Teessmouth Nature Reserve.

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

For more information about the Brent Biennial 2025 visit : https://metrolandcultures.com/events/brent-biennial-2025/