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?

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).

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.   

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

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.

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