Barbican has confirmed its headline 2026 Immersive exhibition: “In Other Worlds”, the first UK solo show by artist, director and BAFTA-nominated producer Liam Young. The exhibition runs 21 May to 6 September 2026, taking over the Barbican Centre with a large-scale dive into climate futures, planetary systems and speculative technologies.
Young is known for work that merges design, filmmaking and futures research. His films often sit between environmental warning and technological possibility, presenting futures shaped by today’s climate science and engineering realities.
“In Other Worlds” brings that approach into a multi-format exhibition built from films, set pieces, miniature models, costumes, comics and sound-driven spaces. Each room pushes visitors into future terrains that feel imaginative but grounded in real climate projections and technological pathways.
World Machine: the new centrepiece
The show’s core commission is “World Machine” (2026), a new film developed for Barbican. It blends live-action scenes with CGI to portray a planet-scale AI system where Earth’s surfaces operate as one computational network. The film imagines energy infrastructures rebuilt in cooperation with rewilded landscapes rather than in conflict with them—data centres powered by renewable megastructures, ecosystems intertwined with computation, and a fragile sense that a reset is still possible.
Key works on view
Barbican will also screen several of Young’s most influential projects:
- Planet City (2021) – a proposal to house the world’s entire population inside a single hyper-dense city.
Source: USC Architecture, 2021. - The Great Endeavour (2023) – a visualisation of the global infrastructure required to extract historic carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
Source: National Gallery of Victoria, 2023. - After the End (2024) – co-authored with Aboriginal actor and activist Natasha Wanganeen, the film narrates a 50,000-year timeline for a post-fossil-fuel Australia shaped by ancestral knowledge and new energy networks.
Source: Adelaide Film Festival, 2024.
Visitors navigate these imagined worlds through graphic-novel excerpts, comics and audio pieces contributed by figures from film, science fiction and visual storytelling. These elements tie Young’s concepts into futures that feel inhabited rather than purely theoretical.
Barbican on why this exhibition matters
Luke Kemp, Barbican’s head of creative programming, frames the exhibition as a timely reset: a moment to “imagine different futures and create the worlds that we want to exist.”
Devyani Saltzman, director for arts & participation, notes that Young’s practice treats alternative futures not as speculation but as a tool for understanding the present with clarity and hope.
