Brent Biennial 2025: FIRE Ritual - Embers of Light

About the workshop

As part of Brent Biennial 2025: Bones, Stones and Calling the Four Elements, we gather in a Fire Ritual to explore transformation through the lumen print process—an alternative photographic technique where objects are placed on light-sensitive paper and exposed to sunlight, leaving ephemeral traces shaped by light and heat.

Beginning with a meditation on fire as warmth, energy, and renewal, we choose intuitively from materials connected to the four elements. Placed on the paper and exposed to sunlight, these materials mark their fleeting presence.

Together we witness images appear, shift, and slowly fade. This impermanence becomes the essence of our ritual: a cycle of ignition, manifestation, disappearance, and renewal. What remains is not permanence, but resonance—an inner fire carried forward. We take our prints with us, allowing them to keep transforming, and continue the practice of presence, trust, and impermanence beyond the workshop.

About the artist

Xinyue Tao (b.1998, Kunming, China) is a London-based artist whose practice explores the subjective perception of time and space through self-identity, memory, and the unconscious. Guided by intuition, her work is primarily rooted in photography, while also extending into performance, installation, and experimental forms. She engages deeply with darkroom printing and alternative photographic processes, integrating light-sensitive materials and slow, embodied methods into her image-making. Tao also embraces collaboration as a working method, co-creating interdisciplinary works and initiating community-based workshops that foster dialogue, shared experiences, and connections. She is dedicated to creating fields of resonance where deep connections can emerge through artistic engagement.

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.

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/