ICP, Ward Gallery and The Road to Nowhere present: A Lens on Diaspora – a photography salon focused on image-makers from the diaspora. The event centers stories of identity, belonging, migration, home, and cultural hybridity, exploring how these experiences shape visual practice.
Presenting lens-based work from four diaspora artists, this salon reflects on communities across borders, inherited histories, hybrid identities, and the idea of home as something remembered, imagined, or constantly renegotiated.
The salon creates space for artists to share personal and collective narratives that challenge fixed notions of place and nationality, and to consider photography and filmmaking as a tool for preserving memory, questioning power, and articulating the diasporic experience as a lived, emotional and political condition.
Following the artist presentations, Ward and The Road to Nowhere invites audience members to engage in a round table style discussion around visualizing home and memory.
Tickets to attend the program are $5 and do not include admission to the ICP Galleries.
About The Road to Nowhere
The Road to Nowhere is a print magazine and digital platform sharing stories from the diaspora. Founded by Dalia Al-Dujaili in 2020, TRTN has published three print volumes covering photography, film, essays, interviews, creative writing, art and other media. TRTN has worked with The Barbican, The TATE, The Photographer’s Gallery, Zaha Hadid Foundation, Refuge Worldwide and many more cultural institutions. The aim of The Road to Nowhere is to celebrate the contribution of migration in culture and the arts. Volume 4 is forthcoming in 2026.
About Ward Gallery
Ward is a New York–based independent gallery and curatorial project founded in 2024 by Saam Niami and Gabrielle Richardson. Known for landmark group exhibitions “New York…NOW!” and “Mélange” in Paris, Ward has quickly become a touchstone in New York’s emerging scene, domestically and abroad. Ward’s mission is to highlight young artists engaged in critical investigations of society through rigorous practice and aesthetic brilliance. Project-based and community-oriented, Ward has attracted both grassroots audiences and institutional recognition. At a moment when many claim “the emerging art world is dead”, Ward insists on artistic excellence over private interests.
About the Speakers
Emily May Jampel is a filmmaker born and raised in Honolulu and based in Brooklyn. Her films have screened at festivals around the world, including the Palm Springs International Film Festival, Aspen ShortsFest, Champs-Élysées Film Festival, Hawaiʻi International Film Festival, and NewFest. Her short film Lucky Fish became a viral hit on TikTok after premiering on NOWNESS Asia. Emily previously worked as a Development Executive at the Academy Award-Nominated and Peabody Award-Winning production company The Department of Motion Pictures (Beasts of the Southern Wild, Monsters & Men, 32 Sounds, Gasoline Rainbow), was an associate producer on the podcast series Operator and a creative consultant on Constance Tsang’s debut narrative feature Blue Sun Palace, which premiered at Cannes Critics’ Week 2024 (Winner, French Touch Prize of the Jury) and was nominated for four Independent Spirit Awards. Emily has curated short film programs for Metrograph, Allies in Arts, Brooklyn Art Haus, and NowHere Gallery, and served as a jury member at the Mint Chinese Film Festival and Oakland Drunken Film Festival. She is a 2026 New York State Council on the Arts grant recipient, a 2024-2025 participant in the UFO (Untitled Filmmaker Org) Short Film Lab, an 18-month fellowship hosted at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. She was a 2023 recipient of NewFest’s New Voices Filmmaker Grant in partnership with Netflix, and was listed on the 2024 Dazed100.
Camila Falquez is a New York-based photographer of Colombian heritage, born in Mexico City and raised in Spain. Her work merges the traditions of fashion and portrait photography with a keen focus on contemporary social and gender diversity. By channeling surrealist conventions and employing a bold color palette, Falquez elevates and empowers her subjects, reimagining their presence through a unique visual language. In 2022, Falquez held her first solo exhibition in New York at Hannah Traore Gallery, titled Gods That Walk Among Us. In 2023, she was honored as the Fashion Photographer of the Year at the Latin American Fashion Awards and that same year Falquez was awarded the TD Bank and NADA Curated Spotlight award. In 2024, she was invited to be a part of The University of Tulsa convening Sovereign Futures with her performance piece with artist Luis Rincon Alba, Chant Down. Falquez’ photographs are in the permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Dean Collection; The Montclair Art Museum, New Jersey; and The Perez Art Museum in Miami, Florida; The Ann and Mel Schaffer Collection, among others. Falquez’s photography explores the intersection of fabric, identity, and historical narrative. Her art reinterprets the traditional use of draped fabric in Western painting, transforming it into a contemporary symbol that challenges and redefines concepts of power and beauty. Projects such as Compañera (2023-2024), a multi-media photography installation and performance advocating for trans and non-binary rights in Colombia; Being (2018-2023), a visual manifesto that reclaims and redefines monumental ideals; all reflect her commitment to amplifying marginalized voices and celebrating diverse experiences.
Wafaa Bilal is an Iraqi-born artist internationally recognized for his online performative and interactive works that provoke dialogue about international and interpersonal politics. His practice examines the tension between the cultural spaces he inhabits —physically located in the relative comfort of the United States while his consciousness remains tied to the conflict zone of Iraq. In his landmark 2007 installation Domestic Tension, Bilal spent a month in FlatFile Galleries while online participants controlled a remote-access paintball gun aimed at him. The Chicago Tribune described the work as “one of the sharpest works of political art to be seen in a long time,” naming him 2008 Artist of the Year. That same year, City Lights published Shoot an Iraqi: Art, Life and Resistance Under the Gun, which reflects on Bilal’s life and the making of Domestic Tension. Using his own body as a primary medium, Bilal continued to confront audiences’ comfort zones through projects such as and Counting... and 3rdi. His work Canto III was included in the Iraqi Pavilion at the 2015 Venice Biennale. His ongoing project 168:01 raises awareness of cultural destruction while fostering collective healing through education and audience participation. In 2025, Bilal presented Indulge Me at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (MCA), a major exhibition further expanding his exploration of power, spectatorship, and the politics of participation. That same year, he was named Artist of the Year 2025 by Arts News. Bilal’s work is held in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA); the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; and MATHAF: Arab Museum of Modern Art, Doha, among others. He holds a BFA from the University of New Mexico, an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and received an honorary PhD from DePauw University. He is currently Arts Professor at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts.
Jalan and Jibril Durimel (b. Paris 1993) lived a quasi-nomadic childhood. Born to French-Caribbean parents in Paris, they spent two years on the island of Guadeloupe before moving to Miami at age four, and then to the island of St. Maarten at twelve. It was on Saint Maarten that they became inspired by cinema and set off to Los Angeles at the age of seventeen to study film. The twin brothers, who are now based in New York City, draw inspiration from their diverse upbringing, and a passion for the evident beauties of the natural world. Through visual expressions their work aims to serve as a spectacle of cultural cross-pollination, and an inquiry into the decadence of simplicity.
Still by Emily May Jambel
