Brent Biennial 2025: FIRE Ritual - Tarot & Transformation Workshop

About the event

”Anger is a source of inspiration and motivation, an immense power that must be trained and constrained lest its fires become self destructive from the inside-out.” - Audre Lorde

Fire is an ancient teacher. It warms the hearth, feeds the body, and lights the path forward. It is the ember that sustains, the beacon that shines the way, the blaze that transforms, and the wild force that both destroys and clears space for what is yet to come.

This gathering responds to the FIRE Ritual of Brent Biennial 2025 by calling on participants who feel the fires within and around us. We hold a space where you are invited to enter into conversation with the archetypes of flame—rage and grief, renewal and creation—and allow them to move through our bodies, our stories, and our collective imagination.

We will approach tarot as a spiritual technology and storytelling to spark new associations and collective insights. Working with archetypes from the major arcana, we will light up connections to ancestors and deities, and scribe new visions with free/collective writing. 

This is a circle for those who feel the rising heat—within the body, within the world—and long to transmute it. We gather not to extinguish the fire, but to learn how to tend it, honor it, and let it illuminate the path ahead.

The workshop will take place inside the Metroland Studios Social Space.

Materials to bring:

- Tarot cards (if you have a deck, please bring them)

- An object you use for spiritual or creative associations

About the artists

Sun Park makes, writes and works as a cultural worker in London. She is currently interested in gossip, friendship, and risk while studying topics like Cosmotechnics, Asian Futurism, and feminist remembering with positive obsession. Lately, the Hanged Man card has been returning to her, and she hopes to write about it in relation to Fred Moten’s idea of nonperformance. She is learning and resting with the Asian Feminist Studio for Art and Research (AFSAR) and Carefuffle Working Group.

Annie Jael Kwan centres diasporic feminist/queer lived experiences and practices, collective knowledge and radical spirituality as part of her PhD research. She instigates and curates the Radical Spiritual Collective, an intersectional multi-cosmological gathering of alternative knowledge and belief systems, intended towards nurturing middle-aged sisterhood and spiritual justice. Her alt-personas of Raving Auntie, High Priestess and oneiromancer are sometimes glimpsed at pasar malams, tiny coastal towns and dimly lit rooftops.

About Brent Biennial 2025: FIRE Ritual

FIRE Ritual takes place from 26 September to 12 October 2025, centring on transformation, 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.