Lead Curator and Commissioner of Island Racing, Fashioning Frequencies, London College of Fashion, UAL, 2025

As lead curator of Fashioning Frequencies, Dr Leila Nassereldein commissioned Studio GKZ – GAIKA Tavares and Jessica Au – to create Island Racing, a major new installation bringing fashion, gaming, sound, motorcycle culture and cinematic world-building into a speculative Caribbean future.

The commission emerged from the exhibition’s wider proposition that fashion operates as a transmission of identity, agency and history: carrying memory across bodies and generations, encoding resistance and opening forms of collective possibility. Rather than treating dress as surface or commodity, Island Racing approached it as an active technology through which movement, power and futurity are organised.

Studio GKZ describes its practice as an excavation of postcolonial possibilities, asking philosophical questions about ‘high performance”’from a migratory perspective. Nassereldein developed the commission around this tension. High performance – so often associated with speed, engineering, mastery and technological progress – was detached from its assumed Euro-American centre and reimagined through Caribbean and diasporic histories of movement, adaptation and cultural invention.

The resulting installation combined an arcade-style motorcycle game with two full-sized bikes, technical garments, sound and objects secured through collaboration with Netflix from The Kitchen. These elements did not illustrate a fictional world from outside; together, they constituted its design system. The motorcycles joined bodily movement to machine performance, while gaming allowed audiences to enter the work as participants, navigating rather than merely observing its speculative terrain.

Artefacts from The Kitchen extended the installation across fashion, film and the imagined streets of future cities. Presented alongside Studio GKZ’s own visual and sonic language, they became part of a wider Black design continuum in which costume, music, transport and gaming operate as instruments of world-making. The official exhibition account identifies this convergence of sonic culture, style and cinematic world-building as a radical design proposition challenging postcolonial power and dominant narratives of futurism.

Nassereldein directed the commission from its initial intellectual proposition through artist development, budgeting, contracting, loans, game production, AV, technical installation, spatial design and public interpretation. Her curatorial role was not to provide a setting for a completed artwork, but to construct the institutional and material conditions through which an ambitious interdisciplinary world could be realised.

Island Racing ultimately asked who has been authorised to imagine the future – and whose technologies, migrations and aesthetic systems have been omitted from its dominant image. The work did not simply insert Caribbean identity into an existing futurist vocabulary. It altered the terms of futurism itself, locating technological imagination within the histories, styles and movements of the postcolonial world.