The Barbican has introduced its headline 2026 Immersive exhibition, revealing that artist, director and BAFTA-nominated producer Liam Younger will debut his first UK solo present subsequent summer time. Titled In Different Worlds, the exhibition will take over Barbican Centre from 21 Might to six September 2026 and guarantees an bold, cinematic journey into speculative futures formed by local weather realities and rising applied sciences.
Younger’s work has lengthy blurred the boundaries between design, fiction and futures pondering. His movies and imagined landscapes typically sit someplace between warning and chance, providing viewers an area to confront environmental urgency with out dropping sight of the optimism required to think about options.
Throughout movies, costumes, miniature fashions, comics and sound-led environments, In Different Worlds goals to immerse guests in future worlds which are fantastical but grounded in actual local weather situations and technological trajectories.
The centrepiece of the exhibition will likely be World Machine (2026), a brand new fee for the Barbican. Combining live-action footage with CGI, the movie imagines a planetary-scale AI system during which Earth’s surfaces function as an enormous computational community. The imaginative and prescient asks what it might imply to construct expertise in cooperation with rewilded landscapes reasonably than in opposition to them.
Huge wind and photo voltaic farms energy information centres; nature and computation coexist; and guests are invited to consider how technological ambition may start once more on completely different phrases. Regardless of its scale, the piece holds a observe of vulnerability, hinting at “our fragile likelihood to start once more.”
Alongside the brand new fee, the present will carry collectively a number of of Younger’s most influential movies. Planet Metropolis (2021), which proposes housing the world’s total inhabitants inside a single hyper-dense metropolis, will sit subsequent to The Nice Endeavour (2023), his visualisation of the extraordinary infrastructure required to take away current carbon dioxide from the environment.
Additionally included is After the Finish (2024), a creation story for Australia co-authored with Aboriginal actor and activist Natasha Wanganeen. The 50,000-year time lapse imagines a world past fossil fuels, the place ancestral data and new power infrastructures form a extra hopeful future.
Guests will transfer by way of these imagined worlds with the assistance of comics, graphic-novel fragments and audio narratives from main voices in movie, science fiction and graphic storytelling. Collectively, they assist sew Younger’s cities, landscapes and communities into coherent futures that really feel lived-in reasonably than purely speculative.
The exhibition marks a major second within the Barbican’s Immersive programme, in line with Luke Kemp, head of inventive programming. He says: “It feels that now’s the time to as soon as once more search for new tales, think about completely different futures and create the worlds that we need to exist, reasonably than those which are being created for us.
“In Different Worlds opens up potentialities for what the longer term might maintain, delivered to life by way of unbelievable environments and movies.”
Devyani Saltzman, director for arts & participation, provides: “Liam Younger’s observe reminds us that envisioning various futures isn’t just speculative however important to understanding at present’s world with creativeness, rigour and hope.”
Introduced by Barbican Immersive, the exhibition will tour internationally following its London premiere.
