The Southampton Institute for Arts and Humanities, together with Winchester School of Art’s PhD Programmes, is excited to present ‘Curating the Brent Biennial 2025: Site, Community and Alternative Knowledge’, a talk with independent curator and visiting PhD researcher Annie Jael Kwan.
This talk will take place on Friday, 17th July from 10:00-12:00 in the WSA PGR Room (East 3024) and on MS Teams, in hybrid format. All welcome.
This lecture offers an in-depth account of the curatorial methodology underpinning the Brent Biennial 2025, examining how a commitment to place, process and collective imagination can shape an alternative model of biennial-making. Responding to specific sites across the London Borough of Brent, the curatorial framework draws on the four classical elements — earth, water, fire and air — as generative lenses for exploring material, metaphor and methodology, and for centring plural and non-Western knowledge systems.
Central to this approach is a two-stage structure: Divinations, a relational pre-programme phase that develops trust and shared vision with local organisations and communities, and Rituals, a public-facing series of live events, assemblies and collaborative encounters. The lecture critically reflects on how this model resists the logic of spectacle in favour of gathering and exchange, and considers the practical and ethical dimensions of fundraising across local and international contexts.
Annie Jael Kwan is an independent curator, researcher and educator whose exhibition-making, programming, publication and teaching practice is located at the intersection of contemporary art, art history and cultural activism, with interest in archives, feminist, queer and alternative knowledges, collective practices, solidarity, sisterhood and spirituality. She is currently undertaking PhD research in Liverpool.