RIEKO by Mika Kailes
As part of the year-long residency with Diasporas Now, we are collaborating with 198 Contemporary Arts and Learning based in Brixton on a series of work in progress performances. Each session is led by a Diasporas Now artist who teams up with a group of artists from ICA Creatives and 198 for an evening showcase of work in development.
Taking place at 198 CAL, the second instalment in the series is a work in progress performance by RIEKO. RIEKO is joined by ICA Creative, Miro Alleyne-McCarthy and 198 CAL artists, Xueting Chen and duo Ayomide Tejuoso & Brutus Labiche (Sandra Habiyambere). RIEKO is a multidisciplinary artist and composer whose practice centres on mythological and speculative world-building. Her work spans performance, experimental sound, collective healing workshops, curation, and community organising.
WIP: Sharing Space highlights the importance of engaging with work that is unfinished and in progress. It celebrates dialogue and collaboration, inviting feedback from audiences and fostering conversations between artists. For this year’s edition we are pairing ICA Creatives with artists from Diasporas Now to encourage skill-sharing, mentorship, and creative exchange among emerging artists.
ICA Creatives is our core youth programme for young people age 16-30. Using the ICA as a resource and the urban environment as inspiration, the programme supports young people in learning various ways of making, gathering, and producing to engage with photographic, sound, and film-focused audio-visual practices.
To find out more about the Speaking Futures x Diasporas Now collaboration, click here.
Bios
RIEKO (Rieko Whitfield) is an artist, composer, and neoritualist, and the Founding Director of Diasporas Now. Her interdisciplinary practice brings together music, mythology, and live performance to create immersive, transformative worlds grounded in spiritual exploration. Blending ritual performance, experimental sound, collective healing workshops, curating, and community organising, her work explores alternative ways of imagining and shaping the future.
Rieko is currently the 2025–2026 Artist-in-Residence with Diasporas Now at the ICA. She previously held a residency at Tate (2022–2023) and earned her MA from the Royal College of Art in 2021. Her artistic development has been supported by organisations including Arts Council England, the Jerwood Foundation, PRS Foundation, Sound and Music, and Help Musicians.
Diasporas Now is a live art collective founded by Rieko Whitfield, Paola Estrella and Lulu Wang. They are a live art collective currently in residence at ICA and working collaboratively on ICA’s Speaking Futures programme, a yearlong series of talks, workshops and performances exploring artists as catalysts for imagining and shaping the future.
Miro Alleyne-McCarthy is a Bajan-British filmmaker and visual artist whose work explores the intersections of myth and magic, and the shifting boundaries between past, future, and an infinite present. His practice is rooted in digital experimentation—whether behind the lens or within software, he continually pushes the limits of form and narrative.
Miro’s work is deeply informed by personal spiritual practice, seeking to uncover truth, foster unity, and question the purpose of creation, all while imagining radical, collective futures.
He is an ICA Creative and a Future Artist with Somerset House. A graduate of the London Screen Academy, his films have been shown at festivals and institutions including the Barbican and New Orleans. He is currently studying Computational Arts at Camberwell College of Arts. Most recently, he exhibited two games at Somerset House’s games festival and presented an audio-visual installation during the ICA Creatives 2024/25 Takeover.
198 Contemporary Arts and Learning is a public art gallery and hub for social engagement, education and creative enterprise. Our work is deeply rooted in our local communities and is influenced by the radical history of Railton Road and the Brixton uprisings.
Established in 1988, the organisation initially aimed to provide a platform for Afro-Caribbean and Asian artists as part of the blossoming Black Arts Movement. Over the last 35 years, our work has evolved, engaging with contemporary issues through exhibitions, workshops, educational projects, and critical debates with artists, thinkers, activists, young people, and local artistic communities. We advocate for diversity within the visual arts, offering opportunities for those aspiring to develop careers in the creative and cultural industries.
198 Cal supports artists including Xueting Chen and duo Ayomide Tejuoso & Brutus Labiche (Sandra Habiyambere).
Xueting Chen (China) is a London-based interdisciplinary artist. Drawing on a background in both civil engineering and fine art, she challenges the conventional uses of industrial materials, creating world-like systems through rough imitation and the reconstruction of real things. Her work intentionally overlooks certain aspects of history, focusing instead on possibilities and contingencies to open new perspectives on the future.
Her interests in epistemology, technology, landscape, ritual, and mythology deeply inform her practice. She often “constructs” installation landscapes, where each act of building symbolizes a cycle of rebirth and death – an attempt to process the grief of insignificance in the face of reality’s dualities.
Brutus Labiche and Ayomide Tejuoso are visual artists, writers, and researchers based in Vevey and London, respectively. Their collaborative methodology is grounded in Black diasporic feminist frameworks, material experimentation, and recursive dialogue.
Together, they are creating MINA – a long-term, research-driven mythology composed of photographs, films, sculptures, essays, performances, and installations. Through sociological and conceptual art systems, they construct mythologies that affirm and archive Black feminine epistemologies.
They understand research as art and art as the manifestation of belief. Their collaborative process values experimentation, rigor, and intimacy—privileging the speculative, the emotional, and the symbolic. Through recursive image-making, they generate culture, belief, and cosmology.
Supporters
In partnership with AnOther Magazine.
Tuesday 12 August, 7pm
Please note this event takes place at 198 Contemporary Arts and Learning: 198 Railton Rd, London, SE24 0JT.
Please note this event takes place at 198 Contemporary Arts and Learning: 198 Railton Rd, London, SE24 0JT.
Book here
Brutus Labiche
Xueting Chen
Ayomide Tejuoso
Miro Alleyne-McCarthy
no. 236848.