ICA is closed from the 30 May – 3 June inclusive.
Diasporas Now by Yiling Zhao
Speaking Futures is the ICA’s new flagship programme of talks, performances and workshops celebrating artists as catalysts for imagining and shaping the future.
For the 2025-2026 Speaking Futures programme, Diasporas Now – a platform of expanded performance by the global majority – will be in residence at the ICA. They will be collaborating on a yearlong series of talks, performances, workshops and practice sharing studio sessions.
Together we will explore how art practice can provide strategies for dreaming new futures. We will foreground collaborative practice, explore the intersection of art and technology, trace sound as political practice and reveal how the body becomes its own language through the practice of live art. Bringing together artists and creatives working across disciplines, Diasporas Now reimagines the future of the arts with collaboration, collectivity and connection at its core.
Speaking Futures x Diasporas Now is a cross-cultural programme of exchange and knowledge production, gathering artists together, sharing urgent discussions and inviting audiences to shape the journey.
Bios
Lulu Wang is a London-based Chinese interdisciplinary artist. She draws inspiration from her heritage and digital subcultures to explore hybrid identities and connections across humanity and social relationships. Through sculpture making, installation, and immersive choreography, her practice revolves around visual work in collaboration with new technologies, fashion, and experimental music.
Rieko Whitfield is a Japanese-American artist and composer whose multidisciplinary practice is part of an ongoing mythological and propositional world-building project. Weaving ritual performance, experimental music, collective healing workshops, curating, and community organising, her work prototypes alternative futures and cross-industry cultural infrastructures grounded in diversity, equity, and artist-guided intuition. She has self-released music through Diasporas Now as her label.
Paola Estrella is a multimedia artist from Mexico based in London. Her work shifts across painting, video, installation, and performance, with speculative fiction serving as a core element of her practice. Estrella delves into the impact of new technologies on public and private spheres, examining how the imaginary shapes social conventions, identity, and our notion of reality. Her interest lies in the intricate tensions and complexities of belief systems and worldviews, the intersection of imagination and perception in relation to transcendent experiences.
Supporters
In partnership with AnOther Magazine.
Programme
Dreaming Artist Futures
Wed 30 Apr, 7pm
Join us for the launch of Speaking Futures x Diasporas Now, a night of readings and artist presentations by Nour Jaouda and Helen Cammock, followed by a conversation chaired by curator and artist Amal Khalaf. Together they will explore artists as catalysts for imagining and shaping the future.
WIP: Sharing Space
Tue 13 May, 7pm
A series of performance-based work in progress crits led by Diasporas Now in collaboration with 198 Contemporary Arts and Learning. The first session in the series showcases work in progress by transdisciplinary artist Joshua Woolford.
More to be announced!
no. 236848.