Brent Biennial 2025 : Earth Ritual Events 26 July

Please book a general admission ticket and then the specific activity ticket

The Brent Biennial EARTH Ritual comprises an exhibition and programme of events 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 Circulaton #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

11:30 am – 1:00 pm walking in your footsteps with Alisa Oleva

1:00 pm – 1:45pm Lunch Break (Visitors are encouraged to bring a packed picnic lunch that could be enjoyed in Barham Park)

2:30 – 4:30 pm Panel discussion and screening with performingborders

4:30 – 6:30 pm Performance lecture & workshop with Lynn Lu

ABOUT

Alisa Oleva’s walking in your footsteps invites participants to take a walk with her in Barham park.

In her words, “I invite you to take a walk with me in this park. To pay attention to your footsteps and the desire lines you make and follow. I invite you to walk in the footsteps of all those who walked this land before you across generations and seasons. What other lands and homes do we bring with us as we walk here in Barham park today? And who lives and is at home in this place and who is passing through never to arrive?

For some, this is the local park they visit every day; for others, it may be their first time here. Together we will listen and touch this place with our hands, ears and footsteps. We will explore its edges and its pathways with counter mapping, slow walking and writing prompts. We will observe how this place imprints on us and how we leave a trace of our dreams and footsteps.”

Lynn Lu’s Slumber for survival with Goddess Nidra comprises a performance lecture and workshop.

The performance lecture will look at sleep through the lens of sleep science, mythology, culture, and politics. And the workshop will be an invitation to partake in collective rest.

The workshop will comprise walking meditation, group reading, guided self-acupressure, progressive muscle relaxation, and yoga nidra. Whether our sleep is imperilled by the neoliberal imperative to be productive or adverse life events and circumstances, improving our rest is imperative for our collective wellbeing and resilience. Slumber for survival with Goddess Nidra will help.

Please note: If the weather permits, the workshop will also extend to the outside spaces of Barham Park. Participants are invited to bring along yoga mats, picnic blankets and towels.

In response to Lynn Lu’s contribution to Earth Ritual, performingborders presents, “performingborders presents “Border rituals: leaking bodies, homes, and transnational collaborations”.

This screening and panel discussion that delve into its archive to share a series of performances to camera that expand the Brent Biennial’s conversation around borders and homes, bodily and material structures, crossing and transition, and coexistence between human and nonhuman worlds.

Across its platform, performingborders has unearthed three performances that speak to the artist as an individual in relation with their bodies and surrounding watery and earthy spaces as well as to their work within shifting, multiplying borders—both physical and digital—that define and disrupt connections.

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/