What’s On: Current Transmissions – four day talent showcase

A four-day showcase and events programme featuring more than 40 recently commissioned works by emerging London-based artists working in audio, moving image, and interactive media will run from February 20-23.

Current Transmissions, presented by The Institute of Contemporary, Trafalgar Square, brings forward the work by some of London’s most exciting emerging talent and underrepresented voices including artists who have had no prior production experience or training.

The scheme seeks to broaden access to production and broadcast opportunities for aspiring or emerging artists aged 16–30, with the ICA serving as its London hub and further regional development hubs across the UK.

Over the two-year project, the ICA and BBC will commission 100 new works for potential broadcast on BBC platforms and beyond.

Artists are selected for the scheme through an ongoing series of open calls; the third call is now open and runs until February 26 and the final call will open in June 2020.

Comfort Adeneye (pictured above), whose commission is available on BBC iPlayer, said: “The problem that my generation often faces with the media is that it is other people telling our stories.

“The New Creatives programme allows people like me to tell my story and tell the reality that I face.

“We would like to see more funding like this put into young filmmakers.”

Displays in the ICA Theatre will feature interactive works, audio works and a screening programme of moving image works.

An accompanying programme of talks and workshops further facilitate networking opportunities for participating artists and their peers, while performances and screenings open the exhibition up to broader discussion.

Among the works on display are Deadly Structures, a first-person open world ‘soundgame’ by sound artists constructed from field recordings made in abandoned industrial landscapes in Leipzig.

Top Wavers is a moving image work that depicts three teen friends joking together about how they achieve their waves hairstyles.

Ishtar is an experimental short film exploring the coloniality of gender centered on the gender-fluid Mesopotamian deity, Ishtar and Staff of Life is a film set in a bakery, that moves between Arabic, Farsi and Urdu while exploring notions of human resilience and fulfilment.

Audio works include Living with the Light On: Switchboard in the 70s which consists of interviews, original music and archive material from the early history of the UK’s leading LGBT+ helpline, and DEM TIMES, a young adult radio comedy drama which follows the re-education of a young British Born troublemaker who is relocated to a Ghanaian boarding school.

These commissions are the result of the ICA’s partnership in New Creatives, a national talent development scheme co-funded by BBC Arts and Arts Council England.