Press room

Programme highlights include voice over and writing talent:  

• Diego Luna (Rogue One, Andor, Y tu mamá también), Jeffrey Wright (American Fiction, The Ides of March, Casino Royale) and Maxine Peake (I Swear, Shameless) announced to voice exhibition audio stories, alongside collaborators British space scientist Dame Dr Maggie Aderin (host of BBC’s Sky at Night), BAFTA-winning Richard Ayoade, and actors Alma Pöysti (Fallen Leaves), Denise Gough (Andor), Natasha Wanganeen (Rabbit-Proof Fence), Jordan Stephens, Shannon Woodward (Westworld) and Adam Young (The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power).
• New audio stories from leading names across TV, film, science fiction and graphic novels, including writers Lisa Joy (Westworld, Fallout), Jane Wu (Blue Eye Samurai), Environmental Social Scientist Holly Jean Buck, Claire G. Coleman (Terra Nullius) and acclaimed writers of future worlds Kim Stanley Robinson (The Ministry for the Future), Chen Qiufan (AI 2041), acclaimed AI scholar and artist Kate Crawford (Atlas of AI), Dame Dr Maggie Aderin (BBC’s Sky at Night) and Natasha Wanganeen (Rabbit Proof Fence) 
• Costumes from Emmy-nominated designer Ane Crabtree (The Handmaid’s Tale, The Sopranos, Westworld)  
• Original music and soundscapes from musicians Forest Swords and Emel Mathlouthi, Lyra Pramuk, Alex Somers, and the Iwiri First Nations Choir, Space Afrika, Julianna Barwick, Ben Frost and Eleanor Jawurlngali
• Future Present: A series of documentaries highlighting global advancements in renewable energy, climate repair and automated agriculture  
• Exhibition to takeover and transform three Barbican Centre locations - Silk Street Entrance, The Curve Gallery and Car Park 5  

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. 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 G. 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 (I Swear, Shameless), Diego Luna (Rogue One, Andor, Y tu mamá también), Jeffrey Wright (American Fiction, The Ides of March, Casino Royale) and Adam Young (The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power), Dame Dr Maggie Aderin (BBC’s Sky at Night), Richard Ayoade (The Mandalorian, The Phoenician Scheme), Alma Pöysti (Fallen Leaves), Denise Gough (Andor), Natasha Wanganeen (Rabbit Proof Fence), Jordan Stephens, Shannon Woodward (Westworld) and Adam Young (Lord of the Rings: Rings of Power).

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, Emel Mathlouthi, Ben Frost, Eleanor Jawurlngali, Space Afrika and Julianna Barwick, in addition to 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” 

Aref Lahham, Founding Partner and Managing Director of Orion Capital Managers (developer of Panorama St Paul’s), says: “In Other Worlds builds on the vision we set out when we began the redevelopment of Panorama St Paul’s – exploring how our environments, technologies and ways of living might evolve towards more resilient futures. At Panorama St Paul’s, we are delivering more than just a best-in-class sustainable workplace. Through our exciting partnership with Barbican Immersive, Panorama will showcase original moving digital artworks on its large public screen from 2027, establishing a platform where business, arts and culture meet.” 

Exhibition Highlights:

Science fiction has long been a shared rehearsal space for our collective dreams of what our future might look like. 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 screen installation available to view for free at the Barbican’s Silk St entrance. This features a collection of animated portraits depicting four 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 a strikingly draped Antechamber space. Visitors are invited to situate themselves within a new physical realm, with audio narration which transports them in a reality far from that of today’s.   

Their journey then continues through 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) is 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. Designed and directed by Liam Young. Written and narrated by Natasha Wanganeen.  

• 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.   

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

• 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, 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. Following it’s London premiere, the exhibition will tour nationally and internationally. The touring exhibition across the UK is supported by the BFI Audience Projects Fund, awarding National Lottery funding. 

The exhibition marks the beginning of a three-year partnership between Barbican Immersive and Panorama St Pauls, a development by Orion Capital Managers, to showcase original moving digital artworks at Panorama St Pauls, London. Artworks curated by the Barbican will be on view from 2027. Further details can be found here.

Lead Sponsor: Panorama St Paul’s, a development by Orion Capital Managers. UK tour supported by the BFI, awarding National Lottery funding.