Brent Biennial 2025: FIRE Ritual – Curing the World?

About the event

An evening of discussion, reflection and renewal – an artist’s talk by Alfredo Jaar titled "Things Fall Apart," followed by a discussion between Jaar and artists Abbas Zahedi and Yarli Allison, moderated by curator Annie Jael Kwan.

The Brent Biennial 2025 FIRE Ritual asks: what if art could burn away indifference, cauterise wounds, and spark renewal in a world ablaze? We live amid inflammation and exhaustion—bodies, minds, and ecosystems scorched by injustice, overheated by grief. Yet in the embers and ashes, art offers not a salve of false comfort, but a vital force: reigniting, enlivening, repairing.

This gathering brings together Alfredo Jaar, Abbas Zahedi, and Yarli Allison, three artists who offer art as a living agent—not a passive reflection, but a fever, medicine, a call.

For more than forty years, Alfredo Jaar has worked at the fault lines of ethics and representation, asking how images and cultural gestures can cut through indifference, disrupt power, galvanise change, and demand empathy. Abbas Zahedi constructs resonant social architectures – part ritual, part encounter – that pulse with collective breath, showing how art can hold fragility and translate it into forms of care. Yarli Allison crafts speculative worlds out of migration, queerness, biotech, and digital entanglement, where survival means weaving tenderness through precarity.

Together, they refuse the snake-oil fantasy of easy cures. Instead, they ask: can art’s true power lie in its ability to gather us, to change us, to imagine otherwise?

This event is not a prescription. It is a provocation, a fire lit in common ground—inviting audiences to see care as resistance, healing as insurgency, and art as a force that might yet reshape the future.

About the artists

Alfredo Jaar is an artist, architect, and filmmaker who lives and works in New York. His work has been shown extensively around the world. He has participated in the Biennales of Venice (1986, 2007, 2009, 2013), Sao Paulo (1987, 1989, 2010, 2021), and Gwangju (1995, 2000, 2020) as well as Documenta in Kassel (1987, 2002). The artist has realized more than seventy five public interventions around the world. Over eighty monographic publications have been published about his work. His work can be found in most major museum collections worldwide. He received the Hiroshima Art Prize in 2018 and the Hasselblad Award in 2020. This year he was selected as the recipient of the 2025 Edward MacDowell Medal.

Abbas Zahedi is an artist whose practice blends sound, sculpture, performance, and social processes to explore memory, identity, and belonging. With a background in medicine from University College London and an MA from Central Saint Martins, Zahedi’s work engages with systems of care, thresholds of experience, and the creation of communal spaces for dialogue. His projects often interweave personal narratives with broader collective concerns, using sound and materiality as conduits for reflection and connection. Recent exhibitions include Tate Modern, CAPC, Bordeaux, and East Side Projects, Birmingham. In addition to his artistic practice, Zahedi collaborates with musicians, researchers, and institutions to develop interdisciplinary projects that explore the intersections of art, architecture, and sonic culture. His work has been recognised with awards such as the Stanley Picker Fellowship, 2024 and Frieze Artist Award, 2022.

Annie Jael Kwan is an independent curator and researcher based in London. Her practice is located at the intersection of contemporary art, cultural and pedagogical activism with an interest in archives, feminist/queer and alternative knowledge, collective relations, sisterhood, solidarity and spiritual justice. She is the Director of Something Human, a curatorial initiative that launched the largest Southeast Asia Performance Collection in Europe at the Live Art Development Agency in 2017, where she also leads Asia-Art-Activism, which is an interdisciplinary and intergenerational network, and is the founding council member of Asia Forum for the contemporary arts of Global Asias, co-launched with the Bagri Foundation during the opening of the 59th Venice Biennale, and presented with Asymmetry Art Foundation for the 60th Venice Biennale in 2024. Her curatorial projects include UnAuthorised Medium, 2018 at Framer Framed (NL), Future Ages Will Wonder, when she was the Curator-in-Residence at FACT Liverpool (2020-2022), and Noguchi Resonances for the Barbican Center (2021). She was also associate curator for Pera+Fauna+Flora, collateral project for the 59th Venice Biennale, and programme advisor for the 12th Seoul Mediacity Biennale (2023). She undertook the role of Curator of the Brent Biennial (2023-2025), and is also a techne scholar at CREAM (Centre for Research and Education in Arts and Media), University of Westminster.

Yarli Allison is a Canadian-born, Hong Kongese art-worker based in London with an interdisciplinary approach traversing sculpture, XR, film, drawings, tattooing, and performances. Yarli’s works were exhibited at Tai Kwun Contemporary Museum, Barbican Centre, Institute of Contemporary Arts: ICA London, V&A Museum. Recent project grants were awarded to Yarli by the Arts Council England, the Canadian Council for the Arts, and the Hong Kong Arts Development Council.

Brent Biennial 2025: FIRE Ritual

FIRE Ritual takes place from 26 September to 12 October 2025, centring on metamorphosis, loss, rage and regeneration. FIRE ignites and mutates, and this chapter of the Biennial explores how creation and destruction can forge new paths through collective acts of remembrance and transformation.

Fire is a tool, both revered and feared. A glowing hearth calls us home, to safety and sustenance. Gentle embers create warmth, while a blazing flame provides illumination and force for change. Its power is exponential and the loss of its control threatens destruction. Fire symbolises the potential for creation and destruction. It challenges the notion that structures should last forever, and instead speaks to transferences of im/materiality across dimensions.

FIRE Ritual forms part of the programme for Brent Biennial 2025. Titled Bones, stones, and calling the four elements, the Biennial is curated by Annie Jael Kwan, and unfolds across a series of four elemental rituals – WATER, EARTH, FIRE and AIR – 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 28 artists presenting workshops, talks, performance and exhibition.

This event is hosted by CREAM (Centre for Research and Education in Art and Media), University of Westminster, as part of Brent Biennial 2025.

FIRE Ritual is presented by the Brent Biennial 2025 in partnership with Metroland Cultures, with the support of Arts Council England, Brent Council, Canada Council for the Arts, Hong Kong Arts Development Council, Granville Community Kitchen, Something Human and University of Westminster.

For more information visit : https://metrolandcultures.com/events/brent-biennial-2025/

Image: © Alfredo Jaar