Brent Biennial 2025: AIR Ritual – Breathing Space

Breathing Space: Art, Wellbeing, and Collective Care

Join us for an open and dynamic dialogue exploring the vital intersections of art, wellbeing, and care, as part of the Brent Biennial AIR Ritual programme. This special session brings together researchers from Arts, Communication and Culture (ACC) and the Creative Health Initiative at the University of Westminster, alongside artists and members of Northwick Park Hospital, to share experiences and collectively imagine new possibilities for creative health.

In collaboration with The People Speak, using their engaging participatory format Talkaoke, everyone is invited to take a seat at the table. Through conversation, storytelling, and speculative thinking, we will explore how art can nurture wellbeing, transform care environments, and build meaningful connections between individuals, institutions, and communities.

This event takes place in the Garden Room, University Of Westminster, Harrow Campus.

Please note, there will be a break for lunch at 1:00pm, and the session will resume at 2:00pm.

About Talkaoke

Talkaoke is a live, television-style talk show format developed by The People Speak collective. It's a great way to connect with strangers and find out about the latest ideas people are talking about! Talkaoke host sits in the middle of an illuminated round table while participants sit around the outside, discussing whatever topics emerge. It's completely non-hierarchical - participants set the agenda by grabbing the microphone and sharing their views. Conversations can be topical, funny, deep, or surreal, creating an unexpected journey from subject to subject. Participants are invited to drop by for as long as they want and contribute to the conversation or just listen. Don't worry if your thought is not fully formed - we will complete it together in the course of the session. You don't have to agree with everybody - we welcome difference of perspectives and explore commonalities.

About the organisers

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.

The People Speak are a collective of artists and creative communicators based in London, collaborating with partners in the UK and Europe. We have 28 years’ expertise in helping people to understand each other and collectively process the complexity of the world. We develop creative, fun and engaging communication tools to repair the damaging impact of polarisation in society in a live - unmediated by AI, technology way. For us, conversation is a creative medium that leads to new ideas - not just means to share information, knowledge and opinions. Creativity is a powerful and rebellious force necessary in areas that are not typically associated with creativity: science, academic research, public decision making, community engagement.


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.