Institute of Contemporary Arts
The Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) is an artistic and cultural centre on The Mall in London, just off Trafalgar Square. Located within Nash House, part of Carlton House Terrace, near the Duke of York Steps and Admiralty Arch, the ICA contains galleries, a theatre, two cinemas, a bookshop and a bar.
For other institutions of this name, see Institute of Contemporary Art.Established
1948: 40 Years of Modern Art, the ICA's first exhibition organised by and Roland Penrose (10 February to 8 March, at Academy Hall, Oxford Street, W1).
Herbert Read
1948: 40,000 Years of Modern Art, the ICA's second exhibition organised by Herbert Read and Roland Penrose.
1948: The ICA and Mars Group organise a symposium on architecture.
1950: London-Paris: New Trends in Painting and Sculpture launched the sculptors.
Geometry of Fear
1950: : His Life and Work, first show in Dover Street at the ICA.
James Joyce
1951: Growth and Form, organised by .
Richard Hamilton
1951: First ICA film screenings at the French Institute.
1952 Sixteen Young Sculptors, organised by .
David Sylvester
1952: Formation of the Young Group, consisting of artists Nigel Henderson, , Reyner Banham and Richard Lannoy, facilitated by the ICA Director Dorothy Morland.
Toni del Renzio
1953: delivers four lectures under the title "The Aesthetics of Sculpture".
Herbert Read
1953: , Director of New York City's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) delivers a lecture entitled "They hate Modern Art or Patterns of Philistine Power".
Alfred Barr
1953: The , including the sculptor Eduardo Paolozzi, begins meeting at the ICA. This leads ultimately to the launch of British Pop Art. The leading theorist of the group, Lawrence Alloway, lectures on "The Human Head in Modern Art".
Independent Group
1953: Parallel of Life and Art, organised by , Eduardo Paolozzi and Alison and Peter Smithson.
Nigel Henderson
1953: features in a show called Opposing Forces.
Jackson Pollock
1954: gives a talk on 'Painting of the Future and the Future of Painting'.
Man Ray
1955: UK Premiere of films.
Kenneth Anger
1955: Man, Machine and Motion, curated by .
Richard Hamilton
1956: delivers a lecture entitled "Art and Theory".
Richard Wollheim
1956: delivers a lecture entitled "Recent Abstract Painting in America".
Meyer Shapiro
1956: delivers a lecture entitled "Aspects of Communication through Painting".
Ernst Gombrich
1956: gives a talk on Revaluation and Futurism.
Reyner Banham
1956: , Anthony Hill and Colin St. John Wilson in public discussion "Revaluation of Duchamp", the first revaluation of Marcel Duchamp in Britain after the Second World War.
Richard Hamilton
1957: First UK screening of the French film by Guy Debord, which caused riots when shown in Paris because it mostly featured a black screen and silence.
Hurlements en Faveur de Sade
1957: Paintings by Chimpanzees, curated by future ICA director .
Desmond Morris
1967: , Pat Douthwaite, Herbert Kitchen and Stass Paraskos exhibition Fantasy and Figuration. Dury was to become a celebrated punk rock musician, and Stass Paraskos had, in 1966, been the last artist in Britain to be successfully prosecuted for showing obscene paintings under the Vagrancy Act 1838.
Ian Dury
1968: The inaugural exhibition in the Nash building The Obsessive Image features a waxwork model of a dead hippie by . The Cybernetic Serendipity exhibition features computers, pulsing TV screens and a mosaic floor made of coloured lights.
Paul Thek
1976: exhibits the first part of Post-Partum Document, an exploration (developed between 1973 and 1979) of the mother-child relationship. Each section highlights a formative moment in her son’s mastery of language, along with the artist's sense of loss. Informed by feminism and psychoanalysis, the work alternately adopts the voice of the mother, the child, and an analytic observer. The installation provoked tabloid newspaper outrage because of stained (but laundered) nappy liners incorporated in "Documentation I".[20]
Mary Kelly
1976: A retrospective of (a performance group whose core subsequently formed Throbbing Gristle) entitled Prostitution features sanitary towels and explicit photographs. The exhibition was held concurrently with Mary Kelly's Post-Partum Document.
COUM Transmissions
1977: , at this point known simply as The Ants, perform their official debut concert in the restaurant. Singer Adam Ant's stage costume at this point includes a bondage hood and other leather garments. The performance is aborted by venue staff after one song, "Beat My Guest" (later the B-side of major hit single "Stand and Deliver"), but is resumed and completed later that day in the main theatre during the interval of a performance by John Dowie and Victoria Wood.
Adam and the Ants
Catherine Elwes
1986: ’s artwork Carcass, consisting of composting vegetation in a perspex tower, is removed after the gasses from the compost caused the tower to give way. The smell led to complaints from neighbours and a visit by health inspectors. The main part of the exhibition, 'The Oval Court' (a major installation of sculptural forms, photocopies of animals, vegetation and the artist's body) was bought by the Victoria and Albert Museum for its permanent collection.
Helen Chadwick
1988: Taking Liberties: AIDS and Cultural Politics, organised by Erica Carter and , tackles cultural and activist responses to the AIDS crisis. A book of the same name is published by Serpent's Tail in 1989.
Simon Watney
1989: shows black-and-white oil paintings of the Baader-Meinhof gang inspired by contemporary newspaper and police photographs.
Gerhard Richter
1990: launches Censored Theatre, a programme of readings of suppressed plays. The first reading of Death and the Maiden by the young Chilean playwright Ariel Dorfman is performed by actors including Juliet Stevenson. Harold Pinter, in the audience, said the play "felt like it was a sequel to his own 1984 play One for the Road, which also revolved around a woman who had been raped and tortured".[25]
Vaclav Havel
1991: ’s International Affairs, his first solo exhibition in a public gallery, features glass cases containing items such as a desk, cigarette packets and an ashtray.
Damien Hirst
1992: The conference Preaching to the Perverted, organised with asks: "Are fetishistic practices politically radical?"[26]
The Spanner Trust
1993: The exhibition Bad Girls, curated by and Emma Dexter, celebrates a new spirit of playfulness, tactility and perverse humour in the work of six British and US women artists: Helen Chadwick, Dorothy Cross, Rachel Evans, Nicole Eisenman, Nan Goldin and Sue Williams.
Kate Bush
1994: A video camera is set up in the men’s toilets of the ICA, and real-time images of urinating visitors are relayed to a screen in the theatre in a piece by Rosa Sanchez.
1994: The world's first cybercafe is held in the ICA theatre.
1995: Bear and Five Easy Pieces, films by future Turner Prize-winning artist , are included in the exhibition Mirage: Enigmas of Race, Difference and Desire, curated by David A. Bailey and organised with InIVA. Other artists whose work is included are Sonia Boyce, Eddie George and Trevor Mathison of Black Audio Film Collective, Renée Green, Lyle Ashton Harris, Isaac Julien, Marc Latamie, and Glenn Ligon. An accompanying symposium, Working with Fanon, debates the legacy of Frantz Fanon within the context of art and visual representation. Speakers include Homi K. Bhabha, Paul Gilroy, Stuart Hall, bell hooks, Isaac Julien, Kobena Mercer, Raoul Peck, Ntozake Shange, Françoise Versages, and Lola Young.[27]
Steve McQueen
1996: display Tragic Anatomies, sculptures of children with genitalia in place of facial features, as part of their exhibition Chapman World.
Jake and Dinos Chapman
1996: The digital film festival is hosted at the ICA for the first time.
Onedotzero
1996: Incarcerated with Artaud and Genet traces the legacies of the avant-garde French writers in a weekend event with participants including the writer and musician , writer Tahar Ben Jelloun, film maker Alejandro Jodorowsky, and theatre director Peter Sellars.
Patti Smith
1997: Four female models, naked apart from high-heeled shoes, stand in mute silence in an upstairs gallery for a piece by Italian artist as part of the show Made in Italy.
Vanessa Beecroft
2000: The annual Beck’s Futures prize is set up to celebrate the work of emerging artists, and continues at the ICA until 2005.
2006: The Alien Nation exhibition is presented with , exploring the complex relationship between science fiction, race and contemporary art. Among the featured artists are Laylah Ali, Hew Locke and Yinka Shonibare.
inIVA
2008: Over a six-month period, and as part of the ICA's 60th-birthday year, the exhibition Nought to Sixty presents 60 emerging artists based in Britain and Ireland.
2010: The first major solo exhibition of cult figure, artist, musician and writer is presented at the ICA.
Billy Childish
2011: The ICA hosts Bruderskriegsoundsystem, a project from Edwin Burdis, , Kieron Livingston and Steven Claydon. Pablo Bronstein's exhibition Sketches for Regency Living takes over the entire ICA building for the first time in its history.
Mark Leckey
2015: The ICA hosts fig-2, a one-year series of week-long exhibitions curated by Fatoş Üstek that included the artists Laura Eldret, Charles Avery, Rebecca Birch, Annika Ström, Young In Hong, Beth Collar, Tom McCarthy, Shezad Dawood, Suzanne Treister, Jacopo Miliani, Kathryn Elkin, Marjolijn Dijkman, Ben Judd, Karen Mirza, Oreet Ashery, Eva Grubinger, Melanie Manchot, Bruce McLean, Vesna Petresin, and duo Wright and Vandame.
[28]
2016: The first edition of FRAMES of REPRESENTATION (FoR) film festival was launched on the 20th of April 2016. FoR was conceived to engage with new visions of cinema through the presentation of innovative and politically aware cinematic languages situated at the intersection between fiction and non-fiction. Throughout its ongoing annual event, the festival presented international and UK premieres of films by , Khalik Allah, Salome' Lamas, Wang Bing, Clement Cogitore, Teddy Williams, Nele Wohlatz, Betzabe' Garcia, Anna Zamecka, Gürcan Keltek, Pietro Marcello, Zhao Liang, Yalda Afsah, Rosa Barba, Ana Vaz, Isabel Pagliai, Dorian Jespers, Alexander Abaturov, Zhu Shengze to mention a few; masterclasses, workshops and conversations with speaker guests such as Walter Murch, Gianfranco Rosi, Laura Poitras, Joshua Oppenheimer and Carlos Reygadas amongst many others. The fifth edition of the festival originally planned for April 2020 was postponed due to the COVID-19 pandemic but due to taking place at the end of 2020.[29]
Roberto Minervini
2019: Image Behaviour with works from , Marianna Simnett, Hannah Quinlan + Rosie Hastings, Keiken, Lawrence Lek + Clifford Sage, Andros Zins-Browne, Lexachast (Amnesia Scanner, Bill Kouligas, Harm van den Dorpel), Ken Okiishi, Julie Béna, Patrick Staff, and others.[30]
Nora Turato
Ewan Phillips 1948–1951
1951–1967
Dorothy Morland
1967–1968
Desmond Morris
Michael Kustow 1968–1970
1970–1973
Peter Cook
Ted Little 1973–1977
Bill McAlister 1977–1990
Mik Flood 1990–1997
1997–2004
Philip Dodd
2005–2010
Ekow Eshun
2011–2016
Gregor Muir
Stefan Kalmar 2016–2021
Bengi Unsal 2022–present.
[31]
founded by former Exhibition Curator James Lingwood and Director of Performance Michael Morris.
Artangel
founded by former Director of Live Arts Lois Keidan.