A major group exhibition and event programme curated by Lubaina Himid is now open at the ICA.
Now open to the public, the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London presents Connecting Thin Black Lines 1985 – 2025, (24 June – 7 September), a major group exhibition and event programme curated by Lubaina Himid, the Turner Prize-winning artist who will represent Great Britain at the 2026 Venice Biennale.
Celebrating 40 years since The Thin Black Line, the groundbreaking group show of young Black and Asian women artists curated by Himid at the ICA in 1985, this exhibition presents work by the original artists Brenda Agard, Sutapa Biswas, Sonia Boyce, Chila Singh Burman, Jennifer Comrie, Himid, Claudette Johnson, Ingrid Pollard, Veronica Ryan, Marlene Smith and Maud Sulter all together for the first time. Featuring new commissions as well as artworks made over the past four decades, the exhibition will extend beyond the gallery space with a rich programme of film screenings, talks, music and live performances – fulfilling Himid’s original ambition for a multi-disciplinary Black arts festival across the ICA’s exhibition, cinema and live spaces.
Highlights include:
- 15 July: A rare event in the UK as four of Bermuda’s finest poets come together on one stage as poetry collective Vex’d Bermoothes. Bermudian scholar Kristy Warren will lead the conversation on the poets' relationship between Bermuda, themselves and the world. These discussions will be interwoven between each poet’s performance.
- 27 July: Signals: A day-long performance during which Trevor Mathison and Gary Stewart will be generating waveforms and frequencies, using audio synthesis and sampling of the ICA’s archive of audio and visual material, accompanied by Tansy Spinks on violin, improvising in response, and a kinetic sound sculpture processing sounds from elsewhere in the ICA.
- 10 August: If you look very closely the poem will paint itself, a live-written poetic response by Andra Simons to the exhibition.
- Additional performances in the summer months include:
- 24 July: Magda Stawarska reimagines her moving image installation Music and Silence (2023) with a live piano performance by Zeynep Özsuca.
- 19 August: Tracing The Thin Black Line, a brand new work by poet Rommi Smith with composer and musician Christella Litras on keyboard & vocals.
- a variety of film screenings and Q&As throughout the three-month programme with Pratibha Parmar, Helen Cammock, Sutapa Biswas and Amber Akaunu
The exhibition also extends online with an ICA Instagram takeover by Tao Lashley-Burnley.
The exhibition highlights the interconnected and wide-ranging roles that The Thin Black Line artists have been playing in art and exhibition making, and the meaningful paths crossed between these artists over the course of the last 40 years. It also features an archival display of professional and personal documents from the original 1985 show, including photographs and never-before-seen correspondence