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Diasporas Now
Institute of Contemporary Arts


Performance art platform Diasporas Now presents a line up of interdisciplinary performance with Tony Njoku, Valerie Asiimwe Amani, Zein Majali, ZINZILE, Pierre and Shauwdii. The artists bring performance art, live music and DJ sets to sound new terrains through body and spirit.

For Diasporas Now’s first national tour, over 20 artists of colour have been selected via open call by co-founders Rieko Whitfield, Paola Estrella, and Lulu Wang, and an additional guest panel of artists Harold Offeh and Michelle Williams Gamaker. The tour takes place across three cities – Northampton, Hull, and London – in partnership with the NN Contemporary Art (Northampton), Humber Street Gallery (Hull) and ICA (London).

Diasporas Now is a platform for expanded performance by the global majority, programming curated events that bridge workshops, panel discussions, museum lates, and nightlife. Their community celebrates cross-diasporic identities and champions artists of colour.

The platform was founded in 2021 by artists Rieko Whitfield, Paola Estrella, and Lulu Wang at the Royal College of Art. Originally focused on live-streamed programming, Diasporas Now has since expanded to live events at the intersection of performance art, visual art, music, dance, and fashion.
The Diasporas Now U.K. Tour 2023-2024 is supported by the Arts Council England National Lottery Project Grant.
Zein Majali is a Jordanian-Palestinian artist currently based in London where she completed her MA in Contemporary Art Practice at the Royal College of Art in 2022. Formerly an engineer and data analyst, she turned to the arts out of an urgency to archive and examine the accelerated cultural shifts in the Arab world. While her work touches on a post-colonial and globalised Middle East, her primary area of interest is the internet and its effects on both geopolitics and community. She is currently an artist in residence at Somerset House and her practice includes video, sound, installation and AI.

Shauwdii is a Audio\Visual artist and DJ from Hackney, London. She experiments with genre bending and field recordings from the city, creating haunting cyclical dub narratives. Her interests lie in destruction, time and morality. She intendeds to uncover the emptiness beneath social allegory through sound, Movement, video and sculpture.

Pierre (they/them) is a dance artist and movement director based in London working around themes of queer history and ancestry, rejection, sexualisation and hope. Their practice focuses on dance, using movement to explore these themes, questions and experiences. They implore elements of contemporary dance, Paraguayan dance and their own movement language. Influenced by poetry, surrealism, ’00s action movies, sci-fi heroines and old diary entries. Their work has been shown across the UK, including presentations at the RVT, V&A Lates, Somerset House, Wellcome Collection Reading Room, The Yard, CCA Goldsmiths Gallery, Ugly Duck & The Place. They have established a performance practice collaborating, sharing knowledge and performing for international artists Anthea Hamilton, Adham Faramawy, Sakeema Crook, Ava Kouchak, Wet Mess, Zoë Marden and Sam Williams.

Tony Njoku is a British-Nigerian composer, music producer and songwriter from London. Raised between Lagos and London, his self-penned and produced songs create a panorama of evocative sound. Since summer 2022, Tony Njoku has released two musical projects as well as toured extensively around Europe, collaborating and performing alongside Black Midi and Metronomy. His 2022 EP Our New Bloom incorporates more live instrumentation and breaths of airy falsetto melodies over electronic sounds, whilst his most recent EP showcases Tony’s skills as a pianist and composer. Both works have received praise from Mary Ann Hobbs (BBC 6 Music), Giles Peterson (BBC 6 Music), Cerys Matthews (BBC 6 Music), Caroline Polachek and many more.

Valerie Asiimwe Amani is a Tanzanian interdisciplinary artist and writer. Her practice interrogates the ways in which body, language, and myth are used to situate (or isolate) the self within community, with works that bridge the political, domestic and intimate. She has exhibited internationally and recent group shows include: Boundary Encounters, Modern Art Oxford; Mundane x Sacred x Profane, Sakhile&Me Frankfurt; and a solo performance, The Weight of Small Things, Hauser & Wirth London with art charity Hospital Rooms. Amani was the recipient of the 2021 Ashmolean Museum Vivien Leigh Prize and The 2022 Ingram Prize. Her work has been featured in Art Monthly and Hyperallergic. She has given various institutional talks on contemporary African art including University of Edinburgh, Carleton University and The University of Johannesburg. She is currently a PhD candidate at The Ruskin School of Art.

ZINZILE (used2b known as FAUCI) is a multi’medium artist working in the physikal, digital + visionary realms. Their work takes foundation in wurld’melding, wurld’bringing. kolaj, omaj, arkiiv, kapture, rapture , selebrasyon + liberasyon practices. they are the eye behind syncretic, creative wurld, lowkeycctv, the facilitator of konfi-dans mouvmant based healing sessions, and the heart and hands behind alkemyka botanyka, divine instruments for healing. ZINZILE’s practice centres around abstract forms of storytelling expressed thru the melding of wurlds, mediums + praktises as ways of finding divine liberasyon, connection + self repair//unification, in response to the conditioning of a compartmentalised societi//wurld. ZINZILE’s current creative lineage has been expressed through: music production, musik, dans, live performance, koreografi, video kreation, cirque + aerial arts,  koreo-kuration + deejay. though this list ever-expanding.
 
06:00 pm
Tue, 13 Feb 2024
Theatre
Ticket information
  • All tickets that do not require ID (full price, disabled, income support) can be printed at home or stored in email
  • For aged-based concession tickets (under 25, student and pensioner) please bring relevant ID to collect at the front desk before the event.
Access information
Theatre
  • We have a small, raised platform to accommodate wheelchair users or others who require a chair. To request, please purchase a ticket, then contact the box office during opening hours on 020 7930 3647 or email access@ica.art
  • If you have other access requirements, need more info, or want to contact us, go to the Access Page

This event is pay what you can

Venue Access

•  Please note a venue levy of £1.50 is applied to the cost of all tickets.
•  ICA Membership discounts do not apply for this event.
•  This event is 18+, general admission, standing.
•  This event may contain the use of haze.
•  We have a small raised platform to accommodate wheelchair users or others who require a chair. To request, please purchase a ticket, then contact the box office during opening hours on 020 7930 3647 or email access@ica.art
•  If you have other access requirements, need more info, or want to contact us, go to the Access Page

Red Members gain unlimited access to all exhibitions, films, talks, performances and Cinema 3.
Join today for £20/month.

Tony Njoku
Shauwdii
ZINZILE
Zein Majali
Valerie Asiimwe Amani
Pierre