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.

Led by Paola Estrella and Joshua Woolford, this second term of ICA Creatives × Diasporas Now focuses on translating ideas and stories across artistic mediums. 

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 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.

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

A series of talks and workshops hosted by ICA in partnership with Croydon based studio and education initiative Conditions.