In 1994, the young German photographer Wolfgang Tillmans was visiting the ICA in London with his parents when he was struck by the power of art. “I took them to the Charles Ray exhibition, and there was a sculpture of a father, mother and baby girl all scaled to the same height, making these babies super-scary giants. My mother was so upset by it, I guess because it shook her sense of the order of things. I’ll never forget it.”
Almost 28 years on, Tillmans is a celebrated artist himself – his retrospective exhibition To Look Without Fear currently occupies an entire floor at MoMA in New York – and since 2019 he has been the chair of the ICA’s board. While its remit is still to be at the parent-upsetting cutting edge of art, the institution, which is situated a short walk from Buckingham Palace, is short of funds and struggling to reassert its identity after the pandemic, which as well as forcing its temporary closure vastly reduced the numbers of people coming into the West End.
Tillmans believes that the ICA needs to “make people aware that there is this spot in the most established place in London that is underground, progressive and also has a really late license.” To this end, he has appointed Bengi Ünsal as the ICA’s director, formerly head of contemporary music at Southbank Centre, in charge of the popular annual Meltdown festivals. She replaced Stefan Kalmár, who in his five years in charge ran a programme centred on the visual arts.
Ünsal’s goal, Tillmans says, is to boost the ICA’s live performance offering, emphasising that the venue is multidisciplinary (as well as a gallery and performance space it includes an arthouse cinema, increasingly rare in London) and in so doing, “to put the ICA back on a sustainable footing with a new mix of programming that brings back evening audiences and activates the bar and uses the late license that we have.”
The ICA receives 21% of its funding from Arts Council England (which amounted to £862,441 last year), but Tillmans says that “there’s a shortfall every year”. He hopes that Ünsal’s programming – involving club nights running until 6am and a partnership with ticket app Dice – will draw in crowds that will make the ICA self-funding: “That’s the goal.” Ünsal has experience of making an arts institution finance itself through sponsorship, brand partnerships and ticket sales alone when she was the boss of Istanbul’s Salon IKSV, which received no public funds.
To plug the funding gap at the ICA until Ünsal’s plan kicks in, Tillmans has organised an auction that will take place at Sotheby’s on 15 October. Artists with links to the ICA including Tacita Dean, Richard Prince and Anish Kapoor have contributed works: Tillmans hopes that the sale will raise at least £1.5m. “Some works are so standout that we might make more which would be an absolute saviour, because the state of arts funding is dire, and this government is not going to expand it.” Two of his favourites are a large picture of a surfer on a wave by Raymond Pettibon, estimated at £200,000 to £300,000, and a sculpture called Rat Bait from a 1992 installation by Robert Gober. “It’s definitely for a connoisseur,” Tillmans says – ideally one with £80,000 to £120,000 to spend.
This year, the ICA put on an exhibition of art by sex workers called Decriminalised Futures, which duly got denounced by the Mail on Sunday – something which would have given a nostalgic glow to those who remembered the outrage inspired by famously transgressive ICA shows by the likes of Throbbing Gristle and Einstürzende Nuebauten (whose 1984 concert involved them destroying the venue using drills). Last summer it hosted the exhibition War Inna Babylon, which examined the history of anti-racist activism in Tottenham, timed to coincide with the 10th anniversary of the death of Mark Duggan, who was shot by police in the north London neighbourhood.
Tillmans says that such exhibitions are the shape of things to come: “That’s the plan, to have an exhibition a year focused on London communities that are under-represented or have suffered injustices in the past. War Inna Babylon was a huge success.”
To some eyes, though, it seemed more like social history than art. “The question ‘but is it art?’ is often thrown at avant garde activity or exhibitions that explore societal events,” Tillmans counters. “Artistic expression and the liberation of people have always gone hand in hand – they can’t be divided.”
He cites the ICA’s next show, by artist Christopher Kulendran Thomas. “On the one hand it’s about the defeated revolutionary struggle for an independent Tamil homeland, where he’s connected to, but on the other hand it’s a super-visually attractive, hi-tech film piece that employs technology that hasn’t really been seen in the UK. It’s been one of our most ambitious productions ever. That is [the ICA] trying to work on the highest visual level and yet have relevant content that matters.”
