The second iteration of the 2025 Brent Biennial opens 24 July 2025!
🌱🐞 EARTH RITUAL
Honoured to be a part of EARTH RITUAL, an exhibition and event programme that explores our relationship with land, time, culture, and the more-than-human world.
On Saturday 26th July, 4.30-6.30pm, I’ll be presenting a performance lecture and workshop entitled Slumber for survival with Goddess Nidra. The performance lecture will look at sleep through the lens of sleep science, mythology, culture, and politics. And the workshop will be an invitation to partake in collective rest.
Sleep deficiency as a public health crisis affecting over 60% of the world’s population. Insufficient sleep is terrible for our bodies, minds, and spirits. But why are we sleeping so badly, and what can we do about it? The terms sleep deprivation and insomnia are often used interchangeably, but they are actually distinct from each other. Sleep deprivation is when we have the ability to sleep, but lack the opportunity to sleep. Sleep deprivation disproportionately affects socioeconomically disadvantaged groups, including minoritized racial and ethnic populations. Insomnia is when we have the opportunity to sleep, but lack the ability to sleep. Insomnia is caused by factors such as genetics, stress, illness, major life changes, menopausal hormonal fluctuations, and/or poor sleep hygiene.
In Hindu mythology, Nidra Devi is the goddess of respite and slumber. Named for the divine personification of sleep, yoga nidra is a meditative practice of deep rest. The restorative power of sleep often manifests in our fairytales at pivotal points to bring about symbolic transformation or renewal. Likewise, writer Haytham El-Wardany asserts that because sleep carries within itself the potential for awakening and starting anew, it is crucial to radical political action and agency – despite outwardly being the most unproductive of human states. At the same time, the recent Tang ping (“lie flat”) movement is the outright refusal by young Chinese adults to be productive in the face of an inhuman work culture. While Tang ping describes a personal rejection of societal pressures to overwork and over-achieve, activist Tricia Hersey positions rest as a racial and social justice issue. Her organisation, The Nap Ministry, seeks to de-stigmatise self-care and sleep, advocating for rest as a form of healing from trauma, and calling for a collective resistance against exploitative late-capitalist culture that ties our worth to our production.
The workshop will comprise walking meditation, group reading, guided self-acupressure, progressive muscle relaxation, and yoga nidra. Whether our sleep is imperilled by the neoliberal imperative to be productive or adverse life events and circumstances, improving our rest is imperative for our collective wellbeing and resilience. Slumber for survival with Goddess Nidra will help.
Please note: If the weather permits, the workshop will also extend to the outside spaces of Barham Park. Participants are invited to bring along yoga mats, picnic blankets and towels.
🖼️ Exhibition:
🗓️ Thursday 24 July – Friday 1 August 2025
🕙 10:00am – 7:00pm
🎭 Performances, Activities & Events:
🗓️ Thursday 24 – Saturday 26 July 2025
🕙 10:00am – 7:00pm
📍 ACAVA Studios & Barham Park (660 Harrow Road, Wembley, London HA0 2HB)
🎨 Meet the artists:
Akira Takaishi (@akiratakaishi) – A visual artist from Japan working with land art, installations, and expressive paintings. His work explores disorienting spatial perspectives and has been shown in Vancouver and Tokyo.
Nick Murray (@cassettewitch) – A composer, artist, and game-maker creating poetic interactive works centered on themes of loss and digital culture. From Sept 2024, he is the ACAVA Artist in Residence at Barham Park.
Alisa Oleva (@alisaoleva) – A London-based walking artist whose work maps the politics of public space. Her participatory projects take the form of performances, walkshops, soundwalks, and urban interventions.
Lynn Lu (@lululotte) – A multidisciplinary Singaporean artist whose participatory and site-specific practice is driven by absurdity, empathy, and shared lived experiences.
performingborders (@performingborders) – A collaborative platform exploring intersectional borders through live art and performance. Co-run by Alessandra Cianetti, Xavier de Sousa & Anahí Saravia Herrera.
Forms of Circulation (@formsofcirculation) – A collaborative practice by Sarah Perks & Paul Stewart, working at the intersection of film, power, engagement, and knowledge.
Curated by Annie Jael Kwan (@alikati)
🔗 Full programme + tickets here.