The Barbican Center has announced its major 2026 immersive exhibition, featuring artist, director, and BAFTA-nominated producer Liam Young in his first solo exhibition in the United Kingdom. Titled "In Other Worlds," the ambitious show will run from May 21 to September 6, 2026, at the Barbican Centre in London, promising visitors a cinematic journey through speculative futures shaped by climate change and emerging technologies.
Young's work has consistently blurred the boundaries between design, fiction, and futures thinking, creating films and imagined landscapes that exist somewhere between warning and possibility. His approach offers viewers a space to confront environmental urgency while maintaining the optimism necessary to imagine alternative futures. The exhibition will feature a diverse range of media, including films, costumes, miniature models, comics, and sound-led environments, all designed to immerse visitors in future worlds that are both fantastical and grounded in real climate scenarios and technological trajectories.
The centerpiece of "In Other Worlds" will be "World Machine" (2026), a major new commission created specifically for the Barbican. This groundbreaking film combines live-action footage with computer-generated imagery to envision a planetary-scale artificial intelligence system where Earth's surfaces operate as a vast computational network. The work explores the concept of building technology in cooperation with rewilded landscapes rather than in opposition to them, featuring vast wind and solar farms that power data centers where nature and computation coexist harmoniously.
The exhibition will showcase several of Young's most influential films alongside the new commission. "Planet City" (2021) presents a provocative proposal for housing the world's entire population within a single hyper-dense metropolis. "The Great Endeavour" (2023) visualizes the extraordinary infrastructure required to remove existing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Also featured is "After the End" (2024), a creation story for Australia co-authored with Aboriginal actor and activist Natasha Wanganeen, which presents a 50,000-year time lapse imagining a world beyond fossil fuels where ancestral knowledge and new energy infrastructures shape a more hopeful future.
Visitors will navigate these imagined worlds with the help of comics, graphic novel fragments, and audio narratives from leading voices in film, science fiction, and graphic storytelling. These additional elements work together to weave Young's cities, landscapes, and communities into coherent futures that feel lived-in rather than purely speculative, creating a more immersive and believable experience for exhibition attendees.
Luke Kemp, head of creative programming at the Barbican, emphasized the significance of this exhibition within the institution's immersive program. "It feels that now is the time to once again look for new stories, imagine different futures and create the worlds that we want to exist, rather than the ones that are being created for us," Kemp stated. "In Other Worlds opens up possibilities for what the future could hold, brought to life through fantastic environments and films."
Devyani Saltzman, director for arts and participation, added her perspective on Young's artistic practice and its relevance to contemporary challenges. "Liam Young's practice reminds us that envisioning alternative futures is not just speculative but essential to understanding today's world with imagination, rigor and hope," Saltzman explained, highlighting the exhibition's broader cultural significance beyond mere artistic display.
The exhibition represents a significant moment for both Young's career and the Barbican's ongoing commitment to presenting cutting-edge immersive experiences. Following its London premiere, "In Other Worlds" will tour internationally, bringing Young's vision of speculative futures to audiences around the world. The show promises to challenge visitors to reconsider their relationship with technology, the environment, and the possibilities for creating more sustainable and equitable futures through the power of imagination and artistic vision.
