Ward Gallery x The Road to Nowhere: A Lens on Diaspora
February 21, 2026 (12:00PM – 3:00PM ET)
International Center for Photography
84 Ludlow Street, New York, NY 10002
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.
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.