Brent Biennial 2025: AIR Ritual – Into the Cave

About the event

Join artist Jessie 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.

This event is co-organised by Brent Biennial and the Arts Communication and Culture Research Community (ACC) at University of Westminster. It will take place in the Auditorium, University of Westminster Harrow Campus.

You will also have the chance to experience Jesse Jones’ sound installation, The Spectre and the Sphere , onsite at University of Westminster. 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 anarchist, communist, 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 haunted histories.

Images:
1/ Production still from The Spectre and the Sphere (16mm film, 2008): Photo of Lydia Kavina by Dianna Caramaschi
2/ Jesse Jones, photo by Mark Duggan

About Jesse Jones

Jesse Jones is a Dublin-based artist, her practice is multi-platform, working in film, performance and sculpture through speculative feminisms and Myth. She studied sculpture in NCAD and IADT and has been making film for gallery installations since 2005. She has shown nationally and internationally with films made in Korea, Los Angeles, Ireland, The UK and Australia.

She represented Ireland at the Venice Biennale 2017 with the film installation entitled: ” Tremble Tremble” whose title is inspired by the 1970s Italian wages for housework movement, during which women chanted “Tremate, tremate, le streghe sono tornate! (Tremble, tremble, the witches have returned!)”. Her most recent work, “The White Cave” will premier in October 2025 at the Singapore Biennale.

She teaches on Sherkin Island, West Cork for TU Dublin and is an elected member of Aosdana.

About ACC

Arts, Communication and Culture (ACC) at the University of Westminster is a vibrant interdisciplinary research community dedicated to addressing the pressing challenges of our times. Our work spans critical issues such as systemic inequality, democratic reform, climate action, care, responsibility, and the societal impact of technology. By fostering collaboration between researchers, artists, practitioners, and communities, we aim to bridge urgent real-world questions with innovative knowledge generated through the arts and humanities. Through this work, we strive to cultivate spaces for dialogue, reflection, and collective action, supporting new ways of living, thinking, and creating in a rapidly changing world.

Brent Biennial 2025: AIR Ritual

Each breath is a new possibility of life. Inhalation and exhalation as cycles of existence. Air is also the catalytic substance of ignition; it represents the power of utterance; declaration, song, whistles, chants, spells, of mobilising ideas and knowledge, people and animals. The intangible, invisible force that creates changes in culture, education, legal systems, religion and ideologies.

AIR Ritual forms part of the programme for Brent Biennial 2025. Titled “Bones, stones, and calling the four elements”, it seeks to invoke a communal spirit of gathering and imagining. Between June to October 2025 four ‘rituals’, WATER (22 June), EARTH (24 July – 1 August) FIRE (26 September – 12 October) and AIR (17 -24 October) will unfold at four Brent sites – a public reservoir, a park, an old medical facility and a university campus. Located in the north and south of the borough — Harrow, Wembley and Kilburn — the ‘rituals’ will feature artists presenting workshops, talks, performance and exhibition.