Barbican announces In Other Worlds, the first UK solo exhibition by Liam Young

Opening in May 2026, the immersive exhibition will explore speculative futures through new films, models, tapestries and soundscapes, including a major commission for the Barbican.

Written By: Ayla Angelos

3 December 2025

A figure in a colourful flower-patterned suit and blue visor surrounded by vibrant coral-like structures in shades of red, orange and gold against a warm-toned atmospheric background

The Barbican has announced its headline 2026 Immersive exhibition, revealing that artist, director and BAFTA-nominated producer Liam Young will debut his first UK solo show next summer. Titled In Other Worlds, the exhibition will take over Barbican Centre from 21 May to 6 September 2026 and promises an ambitious, cinematic journey into speculative futures shaped by climate realities and emerging technologies.

Young’s work has long blurred the boundaries between design, fiction and futures thinking. His films and imagined landscapes often sit somewhere between warning and possibility, offering viewers a space to confront environmental urgency without losing sight of the optimism required to imagine alternatives.

Across films, costumes, miniature models, comics and sound-led environments, In Other Worlds aims to immerse visitors in future worlds that are fantastical yet grounded in real climate scenarios and technological trajectories.

Rusted metal structure wrapped in translucent fabric stands in front of a bright yellow building with red trim

A sprawling industrial megastructure shrouded in mist glows with red lights, depicting a speculative future planetary system from Liam Young's World Machine commission

The centrepiece of the exhibition will be World Machine (2026), a new commission for the Barbican. Combining live-action footage with CGI, the film imagines a planetary-scale AI system in which Earth’s surfaces operate as a vast computational network. The vision asks what it would mean to build technology in cooperation with rewilded landscapes rather than in opposition to them.

Vast wind and solar farms power data centres; nature and computation coexist; and visitors are invited to think about how technological ambition might begin again on different terms. Despite its scale, the piece holds a note of vulnerability, hinting at “our fragile chance to begin again.”

Architectural rendering of stacked modular buildings in coral and orange tones surrounded by lush vegetation, reflected in still water below

Aerial view of wind turbines emerging from clouds, some with visible smoke or steam, against a dark stormy sky

Alongside the new commission, the show will bring together several of Young’s most influential films. Planet City (2021), which proposes housing the world’s entire population within a single hyper-dense metropolis, will sit next to The Great Endeavour (2023), his visualisation of the extraordinary infrastructure required to remove existing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

Also included is After the End (2024), a creation story for Australia co-authored with Aboriginal actor and activist Natasha Wanganeen. The 50,000-year time lapse imagines a world beyond fossil fuels, where ancestral knowledge and new energy infrastructures shape a more hopeful future.

Visitors will move through these imagined worlds with the help of comics, graphic-novel fragments and audio narratives from leading voices in film, science fiction and graphic storytelling. Together, they help stitch Young’s cities, landscapes and communities into coherent futures that feel lived-in rather than purely speculative.

Aerial night-time view of a densely packed city street illuminated by building lights and neon pink atmospheric glow between towering skyscrapers

Futuristic vision of pink neon lights beaming across a vast agricultural field with illuminated skyscrapers in the background, blending nature and technology.

The exhibition marks a significant moment in the Barbican’s Immersive programme, according to Luke Kemp, head of creative programming. He says: “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.

“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 & participation, adds: “Liam Young’s practice reminds us that envisioning alternative futures is not just speculative but essential to understanding today’s world with imagination, rigour and hope.”

Presented by Barbican Immersive, the exhibition will tour internationally following its London premiere.