A preview to celebrate Connecting Thin Black Lines 1985 – 2025

This major exhibition curated by Lubaina Himid celebrates 40 years since The Thin Black Line, the groundbreaking group show of young Black and Asian women artists at the ICA in 1985.

This film season celebrates the work of Pratibha Parmar, whose films have shaped the politics of feminist, queer, and diasporic visual cultures for over four decades.

This evening brings together three films by Pratibha Parmar that explore South Asian queer diasporic life.

A special double-bill screening of Sutapa Biswas’s films Lumen (2021) and Kali (1983 – 85) followed by a Q&A with the artist. 

An evening with Bermudian poets sharing their words, exploring Bermuda and its place within Britain’s wider cultural landscape. 

Helen Cammock’s two-part video work explores the entangled legacies of colonialism, migration, and appropriation. Accompanied by a live performance. 

This series presents three moving image works by Helen Cammock that trace and reimagine histories of Black life across time and geography.

Magda Stawarska reimagines her moving image installation Music and Silence (2023) for this unique presentation with a live performance by pianist Zeynep Özsuca.  

An immersive audiovisual performance connecting the ICA’s history from the 1980s to the present by Trevor Mathison, Gary Stewart and Tansy Spinks. 

This richly layered portrait of Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alice Walker traces her journey from the segregated American South to international literary and activist acclaim. 

Poet Andra Simons turns to art when words fail. Following his 2023–24 readings inspired by Philip Guston’s Passage and Monument at Tate Modern, he now responds to Marlene Smith’s new commission for Connecting Thin Black Lines.

This screening presents two deeply personal and politically resonant works by Helen Cammock: They Call It Idlewild (2020) and Changing Room (2014), followed by a conversation with curator Nydia A. Swaby. 

Through spoken word, Rommi Smith presents a new work in collaboration with Christella Litras on keyboard/vocals, responding to The Thin Black Line, Maud Sulter’s Zabat and beyond. 

This newly commissioned film by Liverpool Biennial 2025, celebrates a deeply personal tale of friendship, single motherhood and alternative, matriarchal community networks in Liverpool 8, one of the oldest Black communities in the UK. 

Marking forty years since The Thin Black Line, this panel discussion responds to Connecting Thin Black Lines by bringing together artists and curators to reflect on the exhibition’s legacy and the evolving practices and solidarities it continues to inspire.

Bermudian writer and performer Andra Simons brings his book Turtlemen to the stage; an often raw and intimate telling, part myth, part truth, that wades ankle-deep into the legacies of ancestral grief and healing. 

This deeply moving and formally inventive work explores lament as both an emotional expression and a political gesture. Interweaving women’s stories of loss and resilience with Baroque music by female composers, the film reflects on how grief, resistance, and memory travel across histories and geographies. 

This evening brings together three landmark films directed by Pratibha Parmar that chart a bold feminist politics of resistance, kinship, and solidarity across transnational feminist imaginaries. The screening will be followed by a panel discussion and the launch of a new publication on Parmar’s work.