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.

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

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.