Brent Biennial 2025: FIRE Ritual - Deheat Mudmud workshop

About the event

Artist Yarli Allison and botanical designer Orin Chung invites you to craft in “Deheat Mudmud”, a hands-on workshop that revives ancient plant-based healing methods in thinking about modern medicine approaches with future biotechnologies.

Drawing from practices of ‘Deep Medicine’ (Raj Patel and Rupa Marya) alongside Sino-botanical wisdom on addressing imbalances in the inner body like ‘heat toxins’ (Cantonese: 熱毒 Jit6 Duk6) and ‘damp-heat’ (濕熱 Sap1 Jit6), the artists invite you to restore the harmony of your full being: to connect symptoms as part of an interwoven web of identities, stories, people, non-humans, land, and environments while biotech advances. You are invited to craft wearable talismans, brew your restorative tea, sip to reset your nervous system.

About the artists:

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 graduated with an MFA first-class honour from The Slade School of Fine Art. Yarli’s works have been exhibited at Tai Kwun Contemporary Museum, Barbican Centre, Institute of Contemporary Arts: ICA London, and the V&A Museum. Recent project grants were awarded to Yarli by Arts Council England, the Canadian Council for the Arts, and the Hong Kong Arts Development Council. Through their work, Yarli explores themes of digital humanity along with belongings, decolonisation, feminist futures, biotech ethics and queer solar punk scenarios.

Orin Chung is a London-based floral and botanical designer and the founder of Oxygen Flower Studio. Known for his transformative installations, Orin reimagines spaces through carefully curated floral compositions that often feel like spatial teleportation, turning environments into ethereal, immersive experiences. Orin’s background in fashion design informs his practice in floral artistry, bringing meticulous craftsmanship, conceptual thinking, and a hands-on experimentation approach to colour, form, material, and texture. This experience has also refined his eye for composition and structure, enabling him to explore new techniques and creative possibilities in his floral work. In 2023, Orin relocated to the UK from Hong Kong, where his East Asian identity and diasporic experiences in urban cityscapes inspired his exploration of new themes. His diasporic perspective informs a critical engagement with nature’s role in cultural identity and spatial storytelling, expanding the discourse on the human-plant relationship.

Brent Biennial: 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. 

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 and Something Human. 

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