Speaking Futures is the ICA’s new flagship programme of talks, performances and workshops celebrating artists as catalysts for imagining and shaping the future.

The 2025/2026 edition of the ICA's core youth programme, will take a multidisciplinary, genre-fluid approach to creativity in collaboration with Diasporas Now.

A multimedia event from the Erotic Review exploring what it means to possess a body –digital, real and imagined – through video, readings and discussion shaped by the Autumn/Winter issue.

Laura Lima joins Andrea Nitsche-Krupp, Exhibitions Curator, in an engaging conversation about Lima's distinctive practice and the development of her first solo exhibition in London. 

The ICA, WePresent and The Messy Truth copresent a one-day salon examining the dual image worlds we navigate today. Hosted by Gem Fletcher, the day brings together artists and photographers including Rene Matić, Elle Pérez, Jack Davison, Hanna Moon, Ronan McKenzie and more.

Gem Fletcher is joined by Jack Davison, Ronan Mckenzie, and Hanna Moon, three artists who have taken risks in an attempt to create new models of publishing, exhibiting and making.

Gem Fletcher is joined by Bruno Ceschel (SPBH Editions/Mack), Brian Paul Lamotte (Designer) and Lillian Wilkie (Editor and co-director of Bound Art Book Fair) to explore what is next for PhotoBook publishing.

In an era of rising authoritarianism, the work of art is perhaps more consequential than ever. How can we use photography to preserve history?

What is the role of a photographer in today's chaotic media landscape?

Are you aged 16-30 and interested in making or curating film? Would you like to learn more about Black culture and history, and the role of archives?

Join the editors and artists behind And Then It Fades (Away) for a conversation tracing the shifting terrain of contemporary Lithuanian photography.

Join Douglas Cantor for an evening celebrating the publication of A Rosa is a Rose, published by miłość, featuring a reading and conversation exploring the tender, hope-laden world of Dallas Paloma.

A collaborative poetry workshop exploring immersive sensory writing, contemporary ecopoetics, and radical community authorship inspired by fieldnotes collective editorial practice.

Celebrate the publication of Tendrils with readings and conversation on poetry, ecology, care and imagining collective futures together.

 A discussion of Olga Ravn's latest novel, exclusively for ICA Members.

Join us for a mindful gathering blending journaling, movement, and film to explore renewal, growth, and our relationship with nature.

A conversation with Anton Jäger, Vincent Bevins, and Nihal El Assar exploring the restless contradictions of our fragmented, hyper-political moment.

Join artist Tegen Williams for a creative drawing class in response to Laura Lima: The Drawing Drawing.

INFERNO 2026 Summit brings together artists, organisers and cultural workers for a one-day gathering at the ICA, reflecting on how queer nightlife and artistic practice continue to function as vital sites of connection, survival and imagination. 

Join us for a special evening with leading artists John Akomfrah and Julianknxx. Working across film, sound and archive, both artists use moving image to tell powerful human stories that question the structures and systems we exist within.  

Closing Diasporas Now’s yearlong residency at ICA, this culminating artist takeover responds to the live art collective’s notion of home – reuniting artists from across the year in a shared final gathering.

An evening to celebrate and explore exciting new writing from independent publishers who create their own forms – from small presses that launch literary prizes, to bookshops who start their own presses, magazines who publish novels, and books that go beyond conventional categorisation. 

Join HELA Press for the launch of Imani Mason Jordan’s PIVOT, an experimental, book-length poem exploring the profound act of turning, with the Haitian revolution as its cornerstone. 

A combined talk and film programme exploring the enduring motif of disguise, desire and deception from ancient myth to modern cinema. Organised with Izabella Scott, author of The Bed Trick: Sex and Deception on Trial (2026).

Izabella Scott and film scholar Lucy Bolton discuss The Bed Trick: Sex and Deception on Trial, exploring sexual deception, desire, identity, and the cultural history of one of literature’s oldest plots.

An interactive workshop inviting audiences into a live, photo-therapeutic creative process exploring connection, authorship, and response to shared space.

A queer cult classic in which Katharine Hepburn cross-dresses as ‘Sylvester’, turning disguise and sexual misrecognition into playful acts of self-invention – cinema’s early flirtation with the ‘bed trick’ and the boundaries of desire and identity.

Author Nicolas Ballet presents Shock Factory: The Visual Culture of Industrial Music in conversation with Stephen Mallinder.

A provocative, lesser-known gem in David Cronenberg’s oeuvre – where love is entangled with deception, espionage and fantasy. This haunting, real-life ‘bed trick’ from 1960s China unfolds as an exploration of self-delusion and the power of cultural illusion, exposing the limits of knowledge as a lover’s identity is unmasked.

Join us for this special conversation between architects Adam Caruso, Peter St John and writer Owen Hatherley to celebrate the release of Collected Works: Volume 3 2010-2020. 

Are you a musician or artist currently navigating your career and funding structures? Join us for MIXER, an information-sharing and networking event that brings together artists working across sound and music with representatives from some of the UK’s most prominent arts and culture funding bodies.

A Palme d’Or winner and indie classic, the film explores performance and deception within intimate relationships, transforming voyeurism and confession into modern ‘bed tricks’, and questioning what is real, what is desired and what is performed.

Theatre and opera director Fabio Cherstich presents Visual Diaries, a poignant lecture-performance honouring 1980s New York artists lost to the early AIDS epidemic.

To celebrate the release of Water Over Thunder: Selected Writings by celebrated photographer Larry Sultan, we’re screening two of his favourite films, Take the 5:10 to Dreamland (1974) by Bruce Conner and Safe (1995) by Todd Haynes.

Join us for a visual presentation by Alessandro Sbordoni exploring the evolving role of images in the age of artificial intelligence and video monetisation, followed by a conversation with British philosopher Matt Bluemink.

Led by artist Lulu Wang, this final term of ICA Creatives × Diasporas Now explores the body as a creative engine. Across six weeks, participants will develop artistic manifestos and experiment with movement tools, body-generated sound and live archiving to build collective performance structures.

 A discussion of Robert Glück's 80s classic, exclusively for ICA Members.

What does it mean to be a citizen today and what spaces can we still call free? In this special talk and screening, Karen McCarthy Woolf discusses her new book Unsafe. Situated in the midst of a reckoning with a politics of enclosure in London and LA, Unsafe is an immersive meditation on place, the body, nature and the self.   

This iteration of PULSE presents London-based artist Linn Phyllis Seeger’s three-channel moving image installation The (Un)event. 

The ICA is pleased to announce that Maite de Orbe is the Artist Development Resident for 2026.

Jenna Bliss, Buck Ellison and Jasmine Greogry join Associate Curator, Nicola Leong to discuss their work in Genuine Fake Premium Economy. 

Join Eyal Weizman, director of Forensic Architecture, for a conversation with Selma Dabbagh celebrating the launch of his new book. Ungrounding charts Israel's destruction of Gaza, providing investigation into links between violence, conflict, and the environment. 

ACV mark the launch of their latest trilogy publication INBETWEEN with an evening of film, conversation, sound and immersive installation.

Join us in celebrating the launch of Sex, Clubs, Dissent with a visual presentation and performance lecture from Amelia Abraham, Sweatmother and Nasir Anthony Montalvo on interpreting queer nightlife histories across print, film and decentralised digital space.

Visible Justice are the 2026–27 Collective in Residence at the ICA.

Opening their year-long residency at ICA, Visible Justice brings together Amak Mahmoodian, Patricia J. Williams, Sunnah Khan and Haia Mohammed, alongside a short film by Walid Raad, to explore visibility, resistance, and the reframing of dominant narratives across Palestine, Lebanon and Iran.

A screening of Cruising (1980), directed by William Friedkin and starring Al Pacino, presented in celebration of the publication of Sex, Clubs, Dissent: Visualising Queer Nightlife by Amelia Abraham. Abraham will be joined in conversation by writer Asa Seresin to discuss the film’s evolving place within queer cinema history.

Writer Em Colquhoun, artists Hilary Powell and Daniel Edelstyn, and economist Ann Pettifor come together to talk about the current era of economic breakdown that has laid bare myths of fairness, progress and meritocracy. 

Step into a special workshop with BEA1991, exploring artist creativity and the artist ego. 

A panel discussion bringing together three influential collectives working at the intersection of art and fashion. The evening features founding members of the Grey Organisation, !WOWOW! and Muslim Sisterhood, chaired by Nina Manandhar.

In celebration of the launch of Femmephilia: Love Letters to Trans Mermaids, Queer Mothers, and Marilyn Monroe, join Sophie Lewis and S. Lamble for a discussion on femme feminism, queer liberation, trans politics, and revolutionary futures.

An evening of music and performance rooted in Black Trans experimentation, exploring identity, survival, and expression through sound, movement, and spirit. Curated by TRIBE, the event features Chloe Filani, The Prodigy Sisters (Munya Jani & Sakeema Crook), faith//agency, and TRIBE.

How have technologies shaped and been shaped by sexuality? Join us for the first London performative lecture of A SEXUAL HISTORY OF THE INTERNET by artist and technologist Mindy Seu, exploring the entangled histories of desire, media, and digital culture.

Maite de Orbe, ICA Artist Development Resident, launches BELIEF SYSTEMS at the ICA Studio, a monthly work-in-progress performance series.

Join us for ICA Creatives: Rift, a celebration of the work created by the next generation of artists and cultural voices, as they take over the ICA for a final event.

Rift is an exhibition of new work by participants of the Young Artist Programme. Spanning sculpture, installation, photography, film, sound and performance, Rift reflects a year of collaboration and exchange.

A rare screening of Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Mask (1996), followed by a conversation between the film’s director, Isaac Julien, and academic Françoise Vergès, who contributed to the film’s production, research and translation.

Join us for the launch of Too Little, Too Hard, a new collection of essays published by Peninsula Press exploring the realities of writing today. Featuring readings and discussion on literary work, the book reflects on value, resistance and the future of writing.

Join writers, artists and filmmakers Lola Olufemi, Sofia Karim, and Saeed Taji Farouky to imagine a rethinking of the present justice system, countering the violence inherent in policing, prisons and punishment. 

The second part of Carceral Injustice: Imagining Abolition will comprise a screening of Steve McQueen’s film Hunger (2008). It explores the limits of the human body in acts of resistance, foregrounding the 66-day hunger strike of Irish political prisoner Bobby Sands at the Maze Prison in 1981.  

To celebrate the end of ICA Creatives: Youth Collective, the group has curated an evening of screening and discussion focusing on film workers from the Global Majority.  

Join us for an evening of short films and music celebrating Liz Johnson Artur’s new video work Pass the Mic and recent publication I Will Keep You in Good Company, exploring Black diaspora communities and their influence on London’s musical culture.

Artist Elisa Giardina Papa speaks with film scholar Erika Balsom about her ICA installation, moderated by curator Andrea-Nitsche-Krupp. 

This iteration of PULSE focuses on the work of ICA Artist Development Resident Maite de Orbe. Across two days, de Orbe will present a work-in-progress installation, offering audiences an opportunity to engage with research and material developed during their residency.

Four artists working across voice, performance, and movement explore what it means to extend the self outward – and to stay present for what returns. Curated by PRIM, the evening features Nali, Sienna King, Sabrena Osei-Tutu, and Cash Nahuo.

A special screening of Looking for Mr. Goodbar with France-Lise McGurn, presented by MARFA journal.

Maite de Orbe and OPerformancef present the second edition of BELIEF SYSTEMS, a monthly work-in-progress performance series in the ICA Studio.

Join us for a screening of Paradise, followed by a conversation between the film’s directors, Calla Henkel and Max Pitegoff.

ICA’s annual book fair returns, bringing together over 90 publishers for a weekend celebrating independent and artist publishing.

Join Ibrahim Azab in building re-imagined cityscapes. In teams and as individuals, participants will build 3D structures from flat images whilst re-composing Capital landscapes. 

Gabby Laurent and Campbell Addy join Gem Fletcher to reflect on how books function within their practice and on their learnings from exploring independent and DIY publishing journeys, as well as working with institutions.

To celebrate the opening of Jesse Glazzard: The Sound of Dirt and Beauty, Jesse Glazzard will be in conversation with artist Biogal and ICA Talks and Events Curator, Hannah Geddes.  

Join us for the London launch of Pina issue #3, featuring a conversation between American Artist and Lola Olufemi, moderated by Pina’s editor-curator Catalina Imizcoz.

What has become of the English working class in the twenty-first century? Join Jonas Patrick Marvin and Amelia Horgan for a talk discussing the launch of his new book with Verso.

How might a gesture become an image? What can queer movements and visual strategies of the past teach us about shared space, authorship and collective making? In this workshop, participants will use photography as a relational tool, exploring staged and improvised encounters with objects, structures and one another. 

Who decides the zeitgeist? What's in and out in contemporary publishing? Independent publishers SMUT Press, HELA Press and Tummy Ache join Flora Gau to unpack who gets published, what gets championed and how to sustain a career in publishing. 

Continuing our exploration of alternative publishing spaces, A Flickering Space Where the Deed Dissolves transforms TALKER into a live, generative publication, weaving interviews, live-feed cameras and record players into an evolving constellation of performance knowledge.

Jesse Glazzard’s new exhibition for GLUE 2026, marks the launch of his new photobook with Self Publish, Be Happy. The Sound of Dirt and Beauty reimagines the idea of the family through photography, intimacy and the living archive.

Join Montez Press to celebrate the launch of Edward Thomasson’s The Whole Routine, with an in-conversation between Thomasson and Fiontán Moran discussing the work, its development and publication.

ICA Creatives is our core young artist programme led by new artists or collectives each year. The 2026/2027 edition of ICA Creatives will focus on emerging London with interdisciplinary design collective RESOLVE.

The first season of ICA Creatives × RESOLVE introduces participants to Starting from the Endz, RESOLVE's framework that centres the local knowledge, lived experience and creativity of young people as a starting point for collective learning and imagining new futures. 

The second season of ICA Creatives × RESOLVE focuses on peer-to-peer learning, collaboration and building lasting networks. Participants will work alongside invited artists, designers, organisers and cultural practitioners, sharing knowledge and developing their own practices through collective discussion and exchange.