ICA is closed from the 30 May – 3 June inclusive.
Before the last sky, Nour Jaouda, 2025. Courtesy of the artist.
Book tickets
Join us for the launch of Speaking Futures x Diasporas Now. Dreaming Artist Futures is a night of readings and artist presentations by Nour Jaouda and Helen Cammock, followed by a conversation chaired by curator and artist Amal Khalaf. Together they will explore artists as catalysts for imagining and shaping the future.
Libyan artist Nour Jaouda works with hand-dyed textiles, fusing life and aesthetic practice through her continual movements between places real and remembered. Exploring how memories attach to places and objects, she threads notions of rootlessness and resilience, destruction and regeneration, and timelessness throughout her work. British artist Helen Cammock works with film, photography, print, text, song and performance. Through her practice she examines mainstream historical and contemporary narratives about Blackness, womanhood, oppression and resistance, wealth and power, poverty and vulnerability. Often layering multiple voices and experiences, her works cut across time and geography to explore the complexities of social histories.
Over the course of the evening, Jaouda and Cammock will share the connections and synergies across their work in different mediums, including their approaches to language, structure and form, and their shared use of memory and daily life in the development of new narratives. Together with Amal Khalaf, the panel will explore how artists merge life with art practice, and the importance of looking to the past to shape the future.
We invite our audience to bring your questions, thoughts and ideas, and take part in the discussion.
For our 2025-2026 Speaking Futures programme, Diasporas Now – a platform of expanded performance by the global majority – take up residence at the ICA. Collaborating on a yearlong series of talks, performances, workshops and practice sharing studio sessions, we will explore how art practice can provide strategies for dreaming new futures. We will foreground collaborative practice, explore the intersection of art and technology, trace sound as political practice, and reveal how the body becomes its own language through the practice of live art. Bringing together artists and creatives working across disciplines, Diasporas Now reimagines the future of the arts with collaboration, collectivity and connection at the core.
Speaking Futures x Diasporas Now is a cross-cultural programme of exchange and knowledge production, gathering artists together, sharing urgent discussions and inviting audiences to shape the journey.
Libyan artist Nour Jaouda works with hand-dyed textiles, fusing life and aesthetic practice through her continual movements between places real and remembered. Exploring how memories attach to places and objects, she threads notions of rootlessness and resilience, destruction and regeneration, and timelessness throughout her work. British artist Helen Cammock works with film, photography, print, text, song and performance. Through her practice she examines mainstream historical and contemporary narratives about Blackness, womanhood, oppression and resistance, wealth and power, poverty and vulnerability. Often layering multiple voices and experiences, her works cut across time and geography to explore the complexities of social histories.
Over the course of the evening, Jaouda and Cammock will share the connections and synergies across their work in different mediums, including their approaches to language, structure and form, and their shared use of memory and daily life in the development of new narratives. Together with Amal Khalaf, the panel will explore how artists merge life with art practice, and the importance of looking to the past to shape the future.
We invite our audience to bring your questions, thoughts and ideas, and take part in the discussion.
For our 2025-2026 Speaking Futures programme, Diasporas Now – a platform of expanded performance by the global majority – take up residence at the ICA. Collaborating on a yearlong series of talks, performances, workshops and practice sharing studio sessions, we will explore how art practice can provide strategies for dreaming new futures. We will foreground collaborative practice, explore the intersection of art and technology, trace sound as political practice, and reveal how the body becomes its own language through the practice of live art. Bringing together artists and creatives working across disciplines, Diasporas Now reimagines the future of the arts with collaboration, collectivity and connection at the core.
Speaking Futures x Diasporas Now is a cross-cultural programme of exchange and knowledge production, gathering artists together, sharing urgent discussions and inviting audiences to shape the journey.
Bios
Amal Khalaf is a curator and artist who serves as Director of Programmes at Cubitt (2019–present) and is also co-curating Sharjah Biennial 16 (February–June 2025), UAE and Ghost 2568 (October - November 2025) Bangkok, Thailand. Amal Khalaf served as the Civic Curator at the Serpentine Galleries (2009–2023) and is now Curator at Large and Advisor for Public Practice, where she shaped the Civic programme and commissioned over 50 long term, collaborative projects, films and moving image works. There and in other contexts she has developed residencies, exhibitions and collaborative research projects at the intersection of arts and social justice. Projects include the Edgware Road Project and Centre for Possible Studies (2009-2013), , Radio Ballads (2019–2022) and Sensing the Planet (2021). She curated the Bahrain Pavilion for the 58th Venice Biennale (2019) and co-directed the Global Art Forum at Art Dubai (2016). She is a trustee of Mophradat, Athens, and not/nowhere, London, and a founding member of the GCC art collective.
Nour Jaouda is a Libyan artist who fuses life and aesthetic practice through her continual movements between places real and remembered. Fig trees belonging to the artist’s grandmother in Benghazi, Libya, lend their poetic impetus for the three textiles displayed in the Biennale Arte. Strongly attached to place, trees hold and embody memories. Jaouda recreates their botanical elements by deconstructing cloth, dyeing it in earthen tones, and then resewing it into sculptural tapestries. She draws from the personification of olive trees by Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish in conceptualisation and title. Threaded through these and previous works are notions of rootlessness and resilience, destruction and regeneration, and timelessness. Jaouda relishes in the slow, physical, and felt processes of fabricating hand-dyed textiles. The textiles’ inherent connectivity begets their association with the eternal and divine; to the artist, textiles have no beginning or end. The vegetal dyes possess their own force and unpredictability, activating the work. Jaouda’s sumptuously layered fabrics reverberate with colours that are deep and ethereal, shadowy and luminescent, and as infinitely textured as memory itself.
She obtained a BFA from the Ruskin School of Art, Oxford University (2018), and MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art, London (2021). Recent exhibitions include the Islamic Arts Biennale 2025, Hepworth Wakefield (2024), Hauser & Wirth Somerset (2024), MOCO Montpellier Contemporain (2024), and the 60th International Art Exhibition, La Biennale di Venezia (2024)
Helen Cammock lives and works in North Wales and London. Her practice spans film, photography, print, text, song and performance; examining mainstream historical and contemporary narratives about Blackness, womanhood, oppression and resistance, wealth and power, poverty and vulnerability. Her works often cut across time and geography, layering multiple voices as she investigates the cyclical nature of histories in her visual and aural assemblages.
In 2017, Cammock won the Max Mara Art Prize for Women and in 2019 was the joint recipient of The Turner Prize. She has exhibited and performed worldwide with recent solo shows including Bass Notes and SiteLines, Amant, Brooklyn, USA (2023), Helen Cammock: I Will Keep My Soul, Art + Practice, Los Angeles, and UNO Gallery, New Orleans USA (2023), They Call it Idlewild, Oakville Galleries, Ontario, Canada (2023), behind the eye is the promise of rain, Kestner Gesellshaft, Hannover, Germany (2022), Concrete Feathers and Porcelain Tacks, The Photographer’s Gallery, London, UK (2021), Beneath the Surface of Skin, STUK Art Centre, Leuven, Belgium (2021), Che Si Può Fare (What Can be Done), Whitechapel Gallery, London, UK (2019), Che Si Può Fare, Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia, Italy (2019) and The Long Note, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, Ireland (2019); VOID, Derry, Northern Ireland (2018). Recent group shows include Soft Impressions, Dundee Contemporary Art (2024), Conversations, The Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, UK (2024), Breathing, Hamburger Kunstalle, Hamburg, Germany (2022) and Radio Ballads, Serpentine Galleries, London, UK (2022). Upcoming group shows include Time For Women! 20 years of the Max Mara Art Prize for Women, Palazzo Strozzi, Florence, Italy (2025), Inequalities, Triennale Milano, Milan, Italy (2025) and Connecting Thin Black Lines 1985 - 2025, The ICA, London, UK (2025).
She is represented by Kate MacGarry, London.
Supporters
In partnership with AnOther Magazine.
Book tickets
07:00 pm
Wed, 30 Apr 2025
Cinema 1
£12 full price / £9.50 concession
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) please bring relevant ID to collect at the front desk before the event.
Access information
Cinema 1
- Both our Cinemas have step free access from The Mall and are accessible by ramp
- We have 1 wheelchair allocated space with a seat for a companion
- All seats are hard back, have a crushed velvet feel and they do not recline
- These are our seat size dimensions: W 42 x D 45 x H 52
- Arm rest either side of the seat dimensions: L 27 x W 7 x H 20
for the following requirements:
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Nour Jaouda
Helen Cammock, I Decided I Want to Walk, 2020. Photography Angus Mill. Courtesy the artist and Kate MacGarry, London.
If the olive trees knew, Nour Jaouda, 2024. Courtesy of the artist.
Helen Cammock, Che Si Può Fare, 2019. Photography by Dan Weill. Courtesy the artist and Kate MacGarry, London.
Helen Cammock, On WindTides, 2024. Courtesy the artist and The Line.
The light in between (detail), Nour Jaouda, 2024. Courtesy of the artist.
Dust that never settles, Nour Jaouda, 2024. Courtesy of the artist.
Helen Cammock, There's a Hole in the Sky Part I, 2016 (still). Courtesy the artist and Kate MacGarry, London.
Helen Cammock, I Will Keep My Soul, 2022 (still). Courtesy the artist and Kate MacGarry, London.
Before the last sky, Nour Jaouda, 2025. Courtesy of the artist.
Helen Cammock photographed by Sebastiano Luciano.
no. 236848.