Brent Biennial: AIR Ritual – Print Gully Zine Fair

Print Gully is a frenetic zine fair where nothing goes as planned. It takes the energy of international shopping plazas and the utility of makeshift printing and turns them into what Homi Bhabha calls a third space, where different publishing worlds crisscross and hybridise.

Following Sara Ahmed, we consider how bodies and things become oriented towards certain stories, audiences and spaces. Print Gully is a reorientation of Harrow Campus’s reception area, transforming an institutional space into a site for collective publishing and marginalia, or how the ‘field study’ comes to the researcher.

In partnership with Brent Biennial and the University of Westminster, Print Gully will take place on 24 October, 11 am to 6 pm, in The Forum at UW’s Harrow Campus. The zine fair is a collaboration with the University of Westminster Library.

We invite makers to submit a single zine to Westminster’s inaugural zine collection. Please get in touch @print.gully!

Definition: “Gully” (from Hindi/Urdu: गली / گلی) means alleyway or side street. It’s often linked to grassroots, street-level culture like gully rap or gully cricket, and evokes a raw, local energy.

About some of the makers:

The zine fair gathers a wide range of makers spanning publishing collectives, independent artists, illustrators, writers, and experimental storytellers. From Less Than 500 Press and Silly Dogs Brunch Club, who celebrate DIY publishing and small press culture, to Print Collective and Beware! The Zine, who merge printmaking and community media, the event showcases the diversity of contemporary self-publishing. Artists like Tania Ali, Ahlam Ahmadi, Studio by Wings, and Pam Kaur Gibbons use zines as tools for cultural reclamation, identity, and care, while Zine Mela extends this ethos through a South Asian diasporic lens. Visual makers such as Jess Dempsey, Stefan Alexander, and Rosa Monsoon blend collage, ceramics, and illustration to explore the poetic, the playful, and the intimate. Liyaan Khoso, Shangomola Edunjobi, and Yarli Allison bring multidisciplinary and narrative-driven practices rooted in performance, comics, and digital art, while Blaft Publications and David Blandy expand zine culture into realms of global pulp, speculative fiction, and tabletop storytelling. From whimsical everyday reflections by Gazette Girlie to politically resonant practices by Becky Lyon and Lucia Morciano, the fair celebrates zine-making as both an art form and a mode of resistance, creating a site where personal stories, radical publishing, and collective imagination meet.

About the practices:

Across the fair, makers approach publishing as an open and experimental practice that values process as much as outcome. Their work spans risograph printing, hand-binding, collage, ceramics-based storytelling, digital zines, community radio extensions, and small-press reissues. Some use zines as tools for education, cultural preservation, or political reflection, while others focus on play, humour, and personal narrative. The approaches range from visual poetry and speculative fiction to queer world-building, illustration, and tactile making. Many see zine-making as a form of social practice that shares knowledge, builds community, and creates alternative forms of publishing beyond commercial or institutional systems.

About the artist

ARSALAN ISA is a writer and artist working at the intersections of publishing, performance, zine- making, and comics. In 2022, he introduced the term “Dissociative Realism” to describe an approach to exploring art objects and assemblage. Through mixed media, he delves into the making of agency, mapping biopolitics, pop culture, and the collective unconscious. His publications include zines on air travel, Victorian literature, plant nurseries, hands, lobsters, cling film, circumcision clinics, demo discs, mixtapes, migrant barges, wrestling, and ballet.

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.