This spring the Barbican Centre exhibition invites visitors to explore imagined futures through film, design and science, questioning how we shape tomorrow together, writes Sam Rogg.
What if the future isn’t something that just happens to us but something we can collectively imagine? The Barbican Centre invites you to do exactly that through In Other Worlds (21 May-6 Sep), a major new immersive exhibition by artist and director Liam Young, unfolding across three locations within the vast Brutalist complex.
For those new to the Barbican, the post-war development is one of the capital’s most distinctive cultural landmarks: a sprawling network of galleries, theatres, restaurants, public spaces and elevated walkways designed for discovery. That sense of movement and experimentation makes it an apt setting for Young’s work, which sits between film, design and futurism. A BAFTA-nominated producer, he is known for building imagined worlds that draw directly on real technologies and environmental changes, using fiction to think through the present.
Created in collaboration with leading voices from film, TV, literature and science, including directors Jane Wu (Blue Eye Samurai) and Lisa Joy (Westworld), Young’s first major UK solo exhibition spans the Barbican’s Silk Street entrance, The Curve gallery and even an underground car park. It’s conceived as a sequence of cinematic encounters, combining large-scale projections, LED installations, sound, costume and graphic storytelling.
Exhibits include World Machine, a newly commissioned work exploring the planetary demands of AI, and Planet City, which imagines a hyper-dense megacity for the world’s population, allowing the rest of Earth to regenerate and recover. Elsewhere, The Great Endeavour considers the vast infrastructure needed to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, while After the End, created with Aboriginal actor and activist Natasha Wanganeen, traces a 50,000-year story from colonial pasts to more hopeful futures.
Around these works, details build a richer picture. Costumes by Ane Crabtree (The Handmaid’s Tale) and a layered soundscape begin to suggest how these futures might be lived from the inside, while an exciting ensemble of actors, authors, scientists and activists, including Dame Dr Maggie Aderin (Sky at Night), Richard Ayoade (The Mandalorian) and Kim Stanley Robinson (The Ministry for the Future) lend their voice to each ‘world’.
Instead of presenting a single fixed vision, this exhibition asks visitors to explore multiple possible futures and consider the role we all play in shaping them. As Young says: ‘The future doesn’t rush over us like water. It’s not something that happens to us. It’s an act of creation. It’s something we make, moment by moment, together.’
