Brent Biennial 2025 - Annie Jael Kwan

Ocean Baulcombe-Toppin, *28.0000° N, 45.0000° W (TIDAL ARCHIVE)*, 2025

Annie Jael Kwan is the curator of the 2025 Brent Biennial, a visual arts festival rooted in the Borough of Brent and the community. Here, we talk about the Biennial, titled Bones, Stones and Calling the Four Elements, which takes place in the form of four rituals across the borough between 22 June - 24 October, in multiple locations.

Kwan is an independent curator, researcher and educator based in London and working between the UK, Europe and Asia. Her exhibition-making, programming, publication, and teaching practice is located at the intersection of contemporary art, cultural and pedagogical activism with an interest in archives, feminist/queer histories and alternative knowledges, collective practice, and spiritual solidarity. You can find out more about Kwan’s initiatives on her website www.anniejaelkwan.com.

The next ritual FIRE will launch on 26 September 2025. Find out more and book here >>>>>>

Book FIRE tickets

All artworks depicted were commissioned for the Brent Biennial 2025, curated by Annie Jael Kwan. All images courtesy of the artist and Metroland Cultures with photos by ACAVA Shoots (Jason Garcia), unless otherwise stated.

Congratulations on delivering the first two rituals, WATER and EARTH, as part of the Brent Biennial 2025. Can you tell us how you came to this idea of the four elements?

Thank you. When I began my research about Brent, I was intrigued to discover the name “Brent” meant “sacred waters” and the flow of the River Brent emerged from and connected beyond the municipal boundary of the borough. As in much of human history, the land near water also becomes a place of convergence, and Brent is one of the most diverse boroughs in London.

As the story of us and the structures we build and inhabit, water and earth are intertwined, I began to think about our relationship to the fundamental elements that comprise all making. The idea of working with the four elements came from a desire to find a language that could be both universal and deeply situated. Air, Water, Earth and Fire are present in every culture, every community, and they hold centuries of symbolism, ritual and imagination.

“Bones, Stones, and Calling the Four Elements,” the title of the biennial, evokes the ancient ritual of alchemy—a practice of remaking and transformation. The biennial’s structure, unfolding across four gatherings, enacts this sacred formation. I sought a framework that could resonate across traditions while inviting artists to engage with the metaphors, materials, and methods of the elements. Through these timeless lenses and the gathering of creative imaginations, the biennial addresses urgent contemporary issues—ecology, migration, histories, belonging, and renewal.

I have had the pleasure of attending both of these events, which were both made up of varying types of audiences, from local sailing enthusiasts to fellow artists, some larger groups and some more intimate. Who are your intended audiences and what do you hope will be the impact that the biennial has on them?

Thank you for joining us for WATER and EARTH. The Brent Biennial is for everyone who lives, works or spends time in Brent, as well as those who come from further afield. I’m less interested in creating an ‘ideal audience’ than in creating porous conditions where different groups—artists, residents, families, enthusiasts, those who may never have thought of themselves as art-goers—can intersect.

For example, it was really fun when a large family that lived near the reservoir came along and they joined in the workshops led by Ocean Baulcombe-Toppin and Becky Lyon which involved tea and coffee tasting with poetry and explorations of soil - and then also tried sailing for the first time. They had never tried it before and were very pleased to enjoy it. I’m interested in how art can play a part to divert our attention economy to shared experiences, and each other. My hope is that people come away with a sense of connection: to place, to each other, and to their own imaginations. If the Biennial can leave behind a set of encounters that feel both surprising and meaningful, then it has done its work.

It looks like you are also partnering with lots of private, community spaces to create pop-ups throughout the year, forging new relationships within the borough of Brent. Such as the Brent Sailing Club for the WATER ritual and ACAVA Studios for Earth. How did you scope out these partners and what was it like getting to know the area?

Getting to know Brent has been an important part of the process. Much of the process was about walking, talking and listening—spending time where people already gather, what they value, and how art might fold into their existing rhythms. The partners were not chosen solely for the ‘fit’ with the elements, but also for their openness to collaboration.

Youngsook Choi, *All That Burnt All That Glow*, 2025. A Metroland Cultures project, supported by Arts Council England, British Council and Ibraaz Live.

Working with the Wembley Sailing Club, for example, was as much about water as it was about learning from a community who have long relationships with that body of water. I spent time on Brent Reservoir, learning to read the wind, to move across the water, and recognise the non-human communities that share it. I had also spent various afternoons and weekends just hanging out in Barham Park, and witnessing the different groups that share the space. We’ve also begun to get to know the artists that reside at ACAVA - who also brought different perspectives to the activities.

These partnerships have been reciprocal—each one has taught us something new about Brent, its social fabric and deeper histories, and hopefully, the experience of collaborating with the artists and encountering the art events, also opened up a different understanding of possibilities.

You invited the artists to question ‘what kind of world would we like to re-make?’. What are the common themes that you’ve found in their work so far?

Recurring themes are of the ideas of care and renewal —care for the environment and our different stories and experiences, care for memory, care for each other; and in these gestures and commitments, bring hope for the future into the difficult present. There’s also a strong thread of recreating rituals, not in a nostalgic sense, but as a way of grounding ourselves in unstable times, and experimenting with new forms for meaning and relations.

For example, Ocean Baulcombe-Toppin’s delicate installation, 28.0000°N, 45.0000° (Tidal Archive), featured jars of collected water glowing in slithers of sunlight evoked both the materiality and ephemerality and materiality of sea-bound histories, while Becky Lyon’s participatory installation, Forista, provided a barista-styled sensory encounter of smells and tastes that awakened new awareness of natural resources. Youngsook Choi’s powerful ritual performance, All That Burnt, All That Glow, involved an unusual collaboration between experienced sailors from the club, artist performers and musicians - as well as with the wind and the water. Dressed in mourning black, they released large lotus leaves, symbolic of renewal, into the water, while plumes of red smoke rose to the sound of drums and lamentations. It was a powerful moment of acknowledgement of our ecological crisis, and the need for a different mode of living and working with the environment.

Akira Takaishi, *Place Far Away from Anyone or Anywhere: Stone Mazes*.

Many artists have also explored thresholds: the space between land and water, past and future, local and global - these liminal spaces that allowed for new pathways of storytelling. For example, Akira Takaishi brought carved rocks from Japan that were installed and dispersed in the park, and then gathered organic soil and materials from the park that were formed and re-situated in the gallery space, that eventually sprouted. Forms of Circulation presented their 16mm film which explored the connections between seal colonies and scientific routines, reflecting on ecological entanglements between human and more-than-human worlds. Across the works, I sense a desire to take a pause, slow down, nourish and to imagine futures that are both more equitable and more attuned to our shared ecologies.

Your curatorial approach is often created out of collaborative processes and iterative, generative thinking. How has the Biennial changed and developed throughout the creation of it? Is it still changing and morphing up to the final events in October?

Absolutely. The Biennial has been less of a fixed exhibition plan and more of a living process - of having to respond to infrastructural conditions, the environment, the needs of each site and various communities, and within these fluctuating, at times, precarious conditions - how to work together. This has impacted the artistic ideas and practices that have been shaped and shifted in response, and thus evolved the different forms of rituals that have become a source of reflection.

With WATER - as the first iteration - there was a sense of launching off, a commitment to taking the journey, and working quickly and collaboratively with all our senses to pull together and navigate uncertainties. WATER was also an opportunity to reflect on the interdependence of life. EARTH brought the gift of respite, and the possibility of intimacy in rest, which also allows for reshaping a sense of time. With FIRE, it has been learning how to engage with the profligacy and insurgency of passion, that is entwined with grief and rage.

Perhaps the Biennial is less of fixed structural form of expectations, but series of rituals that enact its life cycle and brings to the fore these energies. The lessons of how to hold and work with these energies infuse the next - we’re always receiving, learning, responding.

What are the positives and challenges in working to such a long timeline and differing contexts?
The positives are that the opportunities to keep learning and develop depth of relationship over time. A longer timeline allows for genuine collaboration, where partners and artists can influence the process rather than just deliver a brief. It also allows for moments of letting go, reflection and recalibration.

The challenges, of course, are stamina (and courage through the inchoate modes of recall and dissipation) - both for the team and for our audiences, that are intensified amidst the unpredictability of working in public contexts, where external conditions can reshape our plans. But I think the unpredictability is also part of the richness: it keeps us alert and humble.

What do you hope for the next two rituals? How will you approach FIRE for example, differently from EARTH?
FIRE will inevitably carry a different energy. Where EARTH was grounding and slowed us down, FIRE invites intensity, transformation, and perhaps even discomfort. FIRE invoked other feelings - anxiety, grief - scattered embers and ash come to mind. AIR brings a freshness, hope, a reminder of the possibility of renewal that exists in every moment.

I’m interested in how artists might harness FIRE not only in its destructive associations but also in its other capacities - as in the in the messiness of making, the testing of the kiln, as light and a beacon, as a catalyst for renewal—sparking imagination, resistance, or joy. And AIR affords a recalibration from the linear to the cyclical - all things burn out, but may be dispersed for new beginnings.

Thank you so much Annie for joining me and for your inspiring programme!