Brent Biennial 2025: AIR Ritual - Play Through This

About the event

In this discussion we will consider speculative worlding and emancipatory gaming, considering the possibilities and limits of tabletop roleplay for solidarity and societal change. David and his fellow panelists (TBC) will look at the history of gaming and resistance, covering, amongst others, the work of Avery Alder, Jay Dragon, Soul Muppet and Zedeck Siew.

This event will take place in the Garden Room, Harrow Campus, Westminster University (Northwick Park Roundabout Harrow HA1 3TP)

About the artist

David Blandy (he/him) is an artist examining global structures of control and networks of resistance, in areas as diverse as ecology, history, science and arenas of play. He makes videos, games, sound and ephemera, deconstructing forms to put them back together again.

Blandy searches for meaning in cultural life, through an expanded form of auto-anthropology, sifting through multiple forms of archive, from historic texts to academic archives, archaeology and ecological theory, twitch streams and film archives, weaving poetic works that explore the complexities of the contemporary subject. Perhaps it’s hubris, but he wants to build complex stories that sketch out a future of interdependence, through visual poetry and immersive play.

Blandy is represented by Seventeen Gallery, London. His films are distributed by LUX, London.

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.