Royal College of Art announces RCA2026

The Royal College of Art is delighted to announce RCA2026. Running from 18 June to 19 July across three London campuses, this year's vibrant programme of exhibitions and events offers a preview into the future of creativity. Featuring innovative, boundary-pushing projects from 1,600 postgraduate students, the showcase represents the cutting edge of Arts & Humanities, Architecture, Communication, and Design.

The School of Arts & Humanities Show will take place at the RCA Battersea campus from 18 - 21 June. Highlights of student work include:

Working across clay and textiles, Aninda Singh (MA Ceramics & Glass) investigates enduring entanglements between ecology, colonial histories and cultures of consumption. ‘Terra Strata’ positions plants and insects as active agents whose forced cultivation and control shaped colonial expansion and racial hierarchies. By bringing these botanical histories into dialogue with clay structures inspired by termite mounds, the work dwells on how colonial exploitation continues to underpin contemporary social and ecological challenges.

Amanda Seibæk (MA Painting) translates the tension between poetry and scientific language into visual form. ‘A BALLAD’ is a multimedia installation exploring whales, sound, and ecological loss. Inspired by a lone Pacific baleen whale singing beyond others’ hearing range, Seibæk connects personal experience with broader questions of communication and isolation, visualising disappearing underwater soundscapes disrupted by human noise pollution.

From 3 - 5 July, the School of Architecture Show will take place at the RCA Kensington campus. Highlights include:

Aiden Dutton (MA Architecture) specialises in Architecture and Ecology. Inspired by the reintroduction of beavers to London’s Brent River, this project designs for urban flooding, positioning architecture as an interface through which humans actively negotiate with beaver-led landscape processes. It proposes a network of volunteer hubs and monitoring stations that support collective stewardship of a dynamic floodplain, redefining flood management as a civic practice of care and long-term coexistence between humans and beavers.

Ruoyi Wu (MA Interior Design) explores themes of liminality, urban routine and emotional resistance. Her project ‘Off The Clock’ examines commuting culture, burnout and ‘lying flat’ within a near-future Shanghai. Through a speculative train interior, film and ritualised dining experiences, the project confronts the emotional exhaustion of contemporary work by imagining a space where passengers temporarily escape productivity-driven routines.

From 3 - 5 July (Part 1), and 10 - 12 July (Part 2), the Festival of Communication will take place at the RCA’s White City campus, and in the surrounding area. Highlights from the exhibition include:

Aadya Naik’s (MA Visual Communication) practice centres on memory, documentation, and the textures of lived experience. Aadya’s project examines the recipe as a reductive tool, one that records ingredients and sequence but excludes the embodied, sensory, material, and oral knowledge that makes a dish. Drawn from two grandmothers in India, the screen-based work proposes: the unwritten is not supplementary, it is the primary form.

Annie Ziying Liu (MA Digital Direction) blends technology with traditional media to create immersive experiences spanning animation, video games, and interactive installations to interrogate themes of xenobiology, posthumanism, and feminism. Her multi-media experimental film combines two-dimensional illustrations with three-dimensional modelling to visually articulate her thesis of faith as a superposition of certainty and doubt.

The School of Design EXPO will take place at the RCA Battersea campus from the 17 - 19 July, with MA Fashion showing at the RCA Kensington campus from 16 - 18 July. Highlights from the exhibition include:

Junghyun Kim (MA Design Products) focuses on how design can guide human behaviour in more positive and sustainable directions. In ‘Londonban’, he adapts the traditional Korean ‘soban’ (portable dining table) for British food culture to bring people from diverse backgrounds together through shared sensory experiences. Embodying the city's local materials and culture, the project proposes sustainability as a deeper social and circular experience.

Manxin Li’s (MA Textiles) practice draws on the folklore and vernacular histories of southern Fujian in China, decoding historical narratives into contemporary visual languages. Her project constructs a speculative multi-species world where humans, non-human entities, and objects are entangled through networks of consciousness. Through fictional ‘rules’ and visual storytelling, the work explores fear, disorder, and the possibility of coexistence beyond the human-centered lens.

Free and open to the public, the official schedule can be accessed here.

A selection of works from RCA2026 graduating students will be available for purchase through RCA Sales, a special sales platform, which will be open from Wednesday 17 June until Monday 20 July.