Brent Biennial: AIR Ritual – Print Gully Zine Fair

Print Gully is a frenetic zine fair where nothing goes as planned. It takes the energy of international shopping plazas and the utility of makeshift printing and turns them into what Homi Bhabha calls a third space, where different publishing worlds crisscross and hybridise.

Following Sara Ahmed, we consider how bodies and things become oriented towards certain stories, audiences and spaces. Print Gully is a reorientation of Harrow Campus’s reception area, transforming an institutional space into a site for collective publishing and marginalia, or how the ‘field study’ comes to the researcher.

In partnership with Brent Biennial and the University of Westminster, Print Gully will take place on 24 October, 11 am to 6 pm, at UW's Harrow Campus. The zine fair is a collaboration with the University of Westminster library.
We welcome applications for tables, private or communal, from zine makers, artists and educators working between mainstream publishing and everyday life, those who turn complaint into method and print into connection.

We also invite makers to submit a single zine to Westminster’s inaugural zine collection. Please get in touch @print.gully!

Definition: “Gully” (from Hindi/Urdu: गली / گلی) means alleyway or side street. It’s often linked to grassroots, street-level culture like gully rap or gully cricket, and evokes a raw, local energy.

About the artist

ARSALAN ISA is a writer and artist working at the intersections of publishing, performance, zine- making, and comics. In 2022, he introduced the term “Dissociative Realism” to describe an approach to exploring art objects and assemblage. Through mixed media, he delves into the making of agency, mapping biopolitics, pop culture, and the collective unconscious. His publications include zines on air travel, Victorian literature, plant nurseries, hands, lobsters, cling film, circumcision clinics, demo discs, mixtapes, migrant barges, wrestling, and ballet.

Brent Biennial 2025: AIR Ritual

Each breath is a new possibility of life. Inhalation and exhalation as cycles of existence. Air is also the catalytic substance of ignition; it represents the power of utterance; declaration, song, whistles, chants, spells, of mobilising ideas and knowledge, people and animals. The intangible, invisible force that creates changes in culture, education, legal systems, religion and ideologies.

AIR Ritual forms part of the programme for Brent Biennial 2025. Titled “Bones, stones, and calling the four elements”, it seeks to invoke a communal spirit of gathering and imagining. Between June to October 2025 four ‘rituals’, WATER (22 June), EARTH (24 July - 1 August) FIRE (26 September - 12 October) and AIR (17 -24 October) will unfold 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 artists presenting workshops, talks, performance and exhibition.

Host or Publisher Metroland Cultures