Brent Biennial 2025: AIR Ritual – Asia Forum: Exploring diaspora narratives

Asia Forum: Exploring diaspora narratives and intersections of knowledge – panel with Biennial artists Nikki Lam, Quek Jia Qi, Aaron Lim and Adeline Kueh

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.

This event will take place in the Auditorium, University of Westminster Harrow Campus.

Artworks by these artists are on exhibition in various spaces at the University of Westminster Harrow Campus between 17 – 24 October as part of Brent Biennial 2025’s AIR Ritual. More information at metrolandcultures.com!

All of the artists are running workshops during AIR Ritual – please book tickets here!

IMAGES
1/ Still from _2101, 4K digital with sound, 2021, from Nikki Lam, The Unshakable Destiny (2021-2025)
2/ Quek Jia Qi and Aaron Lim, A Mobile Library for Collective Knowledge (2025)
3/ Still from Adeline Kueh, One (and the same)

About the panellists

Aaron Lim is a spatial designer whose practice embraces cross-disciplinary and collaborative modes of making. He is interested in developing participatory methodologies that foster spatial agency and support the collective shaping of spaces and ideas. Centered around playfulness, his approach invites participants to engage with his work through childlike wonder and curiosity, encouraging reflection on their routines through the subversion of everyday objects and rituals. His works have been featured across a wide range of public spaces and festivals, including Noise Singapore, Singapore Art Week, Singapore Night Festival, Singapore Heritage Festival, Park(ing) Day and the London Festival of Architecture. He has also designed sets and exhibition spaces for the National Gallery Singapore, National Library Singapore, Singapore Coffee Festival and Singapore Design Week.

Adeline Kueh is a visual artist who makes installations and socially-embodied works that reconsider the relationship we have with things and rituals around us. Using drawing as a conceptual tool, she looks to cartographies, craft and oral tradition to map out the historical trajectories across time and space through her use of found objects and new productions. As a co-founder of the Critical Craft Collective (Singapore) and the pan-Borneo/UK Serumpun Collective, the centrality of craft in contemporary practice as well as the politics of care are the core foci in her research practice. In light of the ecological turn, Adeline’s immediate concerns have shifted towards ideas around intimate labour, and the politics and poetics of care. Presently a Senior Lecturer with the MA Fine Arts programme at LASALLE College of the Arts, Adeline has exhibited internationally. She is currently a 2024-2026 Ewha Global Fellow (EGF) with Ewha Womans University, South Korea.

Annie Jael Kwan is an independent curator and researcher based in London. Her work sits at the intersections of contemporary art, archives, and cultural activism, with a focus on feminist/queer and alternative knowledges, collective relations, solidarity, and spiritual justice. She is Director of Something Human, the curatorial initiative that launched Europe’s largest Southeast Asia Performance Collection at the Live Art Development Agency (2017). She also leads Asia-Art-Activism, an interdisciplinary and intergenerational network, and is a founding council member of the Asia Forum for the Contemporary Arts of Global Asias, co-launched with the Bagri Foundation at the 59th Venice Biennale and presented with Asymmetry Art Foundation at the 60th Biennale (2024). She currently serves as Curator of the Brent Biennial (2023–25) and is a TECHNE scholar at CREAM, University of Westminster.

Eva Cheuk-Yin Li (she/they) is Lecturer (Assistant Professor) of Media and Cultural Studies in the School of Arts at Lancaster University. Her research explores fandom and audience participation, gender and sexuality, and Hong Kong media and culture. Her work has been published in edited volumes, encyclopaedias, and peer-reviewed journals including Media, Culture & Society, European Journal of Cultural Studies, Feminist Media Studies, and Sexualities. Her recent projects include queer media in Southeast Asia and social media consumption among Hong Kong migrants in the UK.

John Tain curated Of Mountains and Seas, the third edition of the Lahore Biennale, in 2024. As Head of Research at Asia Art Archive (2017-2023), he played a lead role on projects including AAA’s contribution to documenta fifteen (2022); Art Schools of Asia (2021-22); the exhibition “Crafting Communities” (2020), devoted to Thailand-based Womanifesto; and MAHASSA (Modern Art Histories in and across Africa, and South and Southeast Asia, 2019-2020), a collaboration with the Dhaka Art Summit and Cornell University. He serves as an organizer of Asia Forum, a collateral event at the Venice Biennale, and previously worked as a curator at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles.

May Adadol Ingawanij is Co-director of the Centre for Research and Education in Arts and Media (CREAM) and Professor of Cinematic Arts at the University of Westminster.

Nikki Lam is an artist-curator and filmmaker based in Narrm/Melbourne and Hong Kong. Working primarily with moving images and text, their work contemplates time, memory and impermanence. Nikki is interested in the complexity of migratory expressions, fragmentation and relations. Nikki’s work has been shown, published and screened internationally. Their latest work The Unshakable Destiny (2021-2025) is a modular moving image trilogy on Hong Kong cinema and its spectres, exploring diaspora art making as a witness to the slippery political context of a homeland from afar. Nikki is currently co-director of Hyphenated Projects, an award-winning artist-led network that nurtures practice in Asian diasporas, and co-founder of Slow Burn Books. Nikki is a PhD (Art) candidate at RMIT University.

Quek Jia Qi is an artist and educator whose socially engaged practice bridges community and learning through storytelling. Working at the intersection of art and pedagogy, she collaborates with people across disciplines and walks of life. Her work unfolds through site-specific installations, public programmes, and performances that create space for connection and dialogue—inviting new ways of learning, relating, and being together. A recipient of the Social Art Award in 2017, Jia Qi has exhibited her work internationally across the US, UK, Europe, and Asia, including at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) Singapore, Raven Row and 5th Base Gallery in London, Whiteconcepts Gallery in Berlin, Czong Institute for Contemporary Art (CICA) Museum in South Korea, and Framer Framed in Amsterdam, Netherlands. Her work has also been presented at public festivals such as the Singapore Night Festival and Singapore Archifest, and in public spaces across Singapore, London, and New York. Grounded in reciprocity, care, and curiosity, her practice explores how art can be offered as a gift—expanding modes of exchange and nurturing meaningful relationships.

About the organisers

Asia Forum
The Asia Forum for the Contemporary Art of Global Asias is a platform envisioned for discourse surrounding experimental art practices and research that produce hopeful new worlds beyond the North Atlantic. The Asia Forum will bring awareness to and contextualise the fast-developing artistic practices and contemporary geo-politics of Asia/s. Its interdisciplinary approach and reflexive work will reveal and explore deep histories of exchange and flows, and overlapping concerns and heritages. It will engage a ‘public’ eager for discourse on urgent issues of climate, democracy, anti-racism, and creative agency for addressing global anxieties through the lens and engine of “Asia/s’. Asia Forum was launched in 2021/22 with the generous support of the Bagri Foundation.

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.