Brent Biennial 2025: AIR Ritual - Living Knowledge

Living Knowledge: Exploring Community-Led Ways of Knowing, Learning, and Being

Can community-led knowledge exchange inspire new ways of knowing, learning and being?

Drawing on her experiences in Singapore and the UK, artist and educator Quek Jia Qi shares her artistic and pedagogical practice that reimagines how, where, and with whom we learn. In this participatory workshop, participants are invited to explore not only their unique stories, skills, knowledge, and perspectives, but also the ways these can intersect and resonate with others. In collaboration with spatial designer Aaron Lim, the activated installation supports movement, experimentation, and exchange, enhancing opportunities for shared discovery.

Participants will take part in a process of experimentation, sharing, and prototyping, contributing their creation to the mobile library. Each contribution becomes part of the evolving installation that grows and shifts as ideas, stories, and practices accumulate. The ongoing creation celebrates creativity, collaboration, and cross-cultural learning, highlighting the diverse ways knowledge can be expressed, embodied, and circulated. Participants become co-creators in a dynamic exploration of learning and knowledge exchange. The workshop offers a space to reflect on how collective practices can shape new ways of thinking, learning, and being together, while inspiring new models of participation and collaboration within and beyond our learning communities.

This event will take place in Blue Shed, Harrow Campus, University Of Westminster, Watford Rd, Northwick Park Roundabout, Harrow HA1 3TP.

About the artists

A Mobile Library for Collective Knowledge is created by artist Quek Jia Qi in collaboration with spatial designer Aaron Lim.

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.

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.

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.