Barbican announces further details on immersive exhibition In Other Worlds

Film still from After the End (2024) by Liam Young. Image courtesy of the artist.

What if the future isn’t something that happens to us, but something that we can collectively imagine? This summer, Barbican Immersive presents In Other Worlds, the first major UK solo exhibition experience created with BAFTA-nominated film maker, artist, and speculative futurist Liam Young. Spanning three locations within the Barbican Centre, the exhibition transforms the Silk Street Entrance, The Curve and Car Park 5 into a sequence of cinematic future provocations, where world-building, fiction, design and climate science collide.

Created in collaboration with leading voices from film, television, literature and science, In Other Worlds unfolds through an array of bold and wondrous films presented on LED walls and as huge scale projections, as well as audio stories, set design, costumes, movie miniatures, graphic narratives and speculative artefacts. This exhibition invites visitors to step into the imagined worlds of Young and his collaborators, exploring the possibilities and challenges of what the future could hold.

Featured collaborators include writer Jane Wu (Executive Producer/Director of Netflix’s Blue Eye Samurai), American screenwriter and director Lisa Joy (Westworld, Fallout), science-fiction authors Kim Stanley Robinson (author of The Ministry for the Future) and Chen Qiufan (AI 2041), and Environmental Social Scientist Holly Jean Buck, who present engaging character narratives, to immerse visitors into the lives of the inhabitants of these future possible worlds. Accompanied by Young’s illustrated narratives, stories written for each world are voiced by an exciting ensemble of actors, scientists and activists, including Dame Dr Maggie Aderin (BBC’s Sky at Night), Richard Ayoade (The Mandalorian, The Phoenician Scheme), Alma Pöysti (Fallen Leaves), Adam Young (Lord of the Rings: Rings of Power) and Natasha Wanganeen (Rabbit Proof Fence).

Film still from Planet City (2021) by Liam Young. Image courtesy of the artist.

As visitors journey through the exhibition, fragments of graphic novels are displayed to further transport visitors into each world unfolding around them. These depict hidden stories, tools, relics, figures and fragments of lives that might be lived.

Further exhibition collaborators include costume designer Ane Crabtree (The Handmaid’s Tale, The Sopranos, Westworld), as well as music artists Alex Somers, Forest Swords and Space Afrika, in addition to Indigenous Australian artists Eleanor Jawurlngali Repertory and the Iwiri First Nations Choir.

Young’s practice operates in the spaces between design, fiction and futures, creating speculative worlds and visionary films which act as rehearsals for the world to come, capable of holding both our wildest aspirations and our most unsettling truths, where fiction becomes a tool for navigating the environmental urgencies we collectively face today. In Other Worlds poses a question to visitors: what stories are we leaving behind and what new stories do we dare to imagine if we have no time left to wait?

In this timely exhibition, visitors are invited to immerse themselves in a series of imagined futures for our planet, rooted in real technology and climate-based possibilities. The exhibition is a key highlight of the Barbican’s Summer season.

Liam Young, Artist and Director, says:

I am delighted to be able to present my first major UK solo exhibition experience at the Barbican and feel honoured to be joined by so many world class collaborators. We have always learned about the future through stories. Imaginary Worlds aren’t concerned with predicting the future, instead they prepare us for it. Within their fictional streets and speculative landscapes, we rehearse new ways of living, new relationships between humans and machines, between cities and the living Earth, between extinction and survival. We can glimpse the beliefs that build worlds and those that end them.

Luke Kemp, Head of Creative Programming, Barbican Immersive, says:

The Immersive programme at the Barbican is a place to explore some of the most important topics of our times that place the visitor at the heart of the experience. It is hugely exciting to be working with Liam Young and his collaborators on this major exhibition as 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. These wondrous environments created with leading talents will take us closer to what the possibilities could be.

Drone Shepherd. In Other Worlds, Barbican. Image courtesy of the artist.

Exhibition Highlights

Science fiction has long been a shared rehearsal space for our collective dreams of what our future might look like and Young, through a chorus of stories, that sprawl from the microscopic to the planetary, emphasises to us the importance of imagination in a world where much seems to be in crisis. This immersive experience maps a constellation of fictional worlds, calling visitors to join in visions of a wondrous resistance in which a generation is called to the quiet, defiant labour of hope.

Visitors are first introduced to In Other Worlds with a transfixing LED installation available to view for free at the Barbican’s Silk St entrance. This features a collection of animated portraits depicting three workers, who inhabit one of the imagined ‘future worlds’ presented further on in the experience, entitled After The End. These characters, integral to the building of a hopeful new future, help to usher in a new era of creation and storytelling, revealing to us the opportunities we are afforded when we are able to begin again. 

From the Silk Street entrance, the exhibition continues into The Curve gallery, where guests are welcomed into an a strikingly draped Antechamber space. Visitors are invited to situate themselves within a new physical realm, with synthesising audio narration which transports them in a reality far from that of today’s. 

Their journey then continues through to The Curve where they will explore worlds and provocations built out of and around each of the following films:

• World Machine (2026), a newly commissioned film by Young for the Barbican which will have its world premiere in the space with a 12m wide projection. In this world, there is a moment of transformative reckoning as new technologies are created at a planetary scale. Bringing together real-life footage and CGI to reflect on the accelerating demands of large-scale AI, World Machine speculates on a future in which a planetary supercomputer emerges and all of Earth’s surfaces are woven into circuits of power and calculation. In theorising on the potential for vast wind and solar farms to power AI data centres which might exist in cooperation with rewilded landscapes, Young invites visitors to further their understanding of the intricate balance between technological advancement and environmental stewardship. 

• After the End (2024), a new creation story for Australia, co-authored with Aboriginal actor and activist Natasha Wanganeen. Created as a 50,000-year timelapse film, the story explores the journey of the earliest First Nations communities, through colonisation and a history of resource extraction, to a hopeful sci-fi future where new energy infrastructures emerge, and communities re-populate land from which they were once removed.

• Planet City (2021), an expansive film depicting the bringing together of the world’s population into one hyper-dense mega city, where we surrender the rest of the world to a global scaled wilderness, for Earth to regenerate. Set in an imaginary city home to 10 billion people, this film contemplates the potential of the world’s population retreating from its vast network of cities and entangled supply chains into one hyper-dense metropolis housing the entire population of the Earth.

• The Great Endeavour (2023), a visualisation of the design and immense scale of construction required to remove existing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Premiered at the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale, The Great Endeavour provides visitors with the opportunity to embrace a project of global collaboration and unprecedented unified purpose. In this colossal effort to stave off human extinction, Young supposes the advent of a new infrastructural project that embraces this challenge with radical optimism and designs and visualises how this infrastructural imaginary could be built. 

From The Curve, In Other Worlds will guide visitors into the Barbican Car Park to experience:

• The Future Present, a captivating series of short documentaries displayed across seven LED screens. The culmination of Young’s research-led travels, and featuring footage captured on journeys with his nomadic studio Unknown Fields, co-created with artist and architect Kate Davies, The Future Present sheds light on the renewable energy and agriculture sites that already exist around the world today, evidencing that much of the technologies required to imagine these different and hopeful worlds are already in existence.

• Emissary (2024), a film made in collaboration with engineers from NASA Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL). Charting the journey of a fictional spacecraft on a voyage through our solar system, traversing strange new planetary alignments developed from real astronomical observations, Emissary presents the last human-made object in existence: a record of everything humanity has created and achieved.  Emissary explores what message a society on the brink of its own extinction would send.

From the new beginnings of After the End to the concentrated urban utopia of Planet City to the climate engineering mega-projects of World Machine and The Great Endeavour and the epilogue of Emissary, these worlds offer radical alternatives to dystopian collapse and eco-romanticism.

In Other Worlds is presented by Barbican Immersive, a programming strand focused on contemporary culture, emerging technology and digital creativity. After it’s London premiere, the exhibition will tour internationally.

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In Other Worlds will run at Barbican from 21st May to 6th September 2026. For more information, visit barbican.org.uk