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 Director, Artist, and speculative Architect Liam Young.
Running from May 21 to September 6, and spanning three locations within the Barbican Centre, the exhibition transforms the Silk Street Entrance, The Curve Gallery 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 for the audio stories including 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), Environmental Social Scientist Holly Jean Buck, Claire Coleman (Terra Nullius) and AI scholar and artist Kate Crawford (Atlas of AI), present engaging character narratives, to immerse visitors into the lives of the inhabitants of these future possible worlds.
Accompanied by Young’s illustrated narratives, these stories written for each world are voiced by an exciting ensemble of actors, scientists and activists, including Maxine Peake, Diego Luna, Jeffrey Wright and Adam Young, Dame Dr Maggie Aderin, Richard Ayoade, Alma Pöysti, Denise Gough, and Natasha Wanganeen.
As visitors journey through the exhibition, graphic novel fragments are displayed to further transport them into each world unfolding around them. These depict hidden stories, tools, relics, figures and fragments of lives that might be lived.
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