Brent Biennial 2025: AIR Ritual – Crafting Circles

Crafting circles: kinning, care and resilience

How might we connect through craft and ritual? Perhaps through love languages that sit at the intersection of care, making, and storytelling. As I consider the home as one of many vessels, I turn to rituals such as the making of the rosette, which functions as both leitmotif and visual metaphor. This symbol holds layers of matrilineal stories and intergenerational knowledge—intimately private, yet resonating as forms of public remembrance. Participants will gather to learn how to sew the fabric rosettes while sharing stories about rituals within the home, and their recollections of craft practices.

You will also have the opportunity to visit Adeline Kueh's exhibition A Blade of Grass Behind the Ear which will be on display onsite:

As I consider the home as one of many vessels, I turn to rituals such as the making of the rosette, which functions as both leitmotif and visual metaphor. This symbol holds layers of matrilineal stories and intergenerational knowledge—intimately private, yet resonating as forms of public remembrance.

Through a combination of video works, installations, and collected oral histories, the project weaves together themes of memory, transformation, and legacy. In this context, air becomes a metaphor for continuity—for the invisible yet vital flows that sustain life, connection, and exchange across time, space, and generations.

Images courtesy of the artist.

This workshop will take place in Blue Shed, Harrow Campus, University Of Westminster, Watford Rd, Northwick Park Roundabout, Harrow HA1 3TP. Room announcement will be given nearer the time.

About the artist

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.

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.