The Barbican Centre has announced In Other Worlds, a major immersive exhibition by speculative architect, filmmaker, and artist Liam Young, opening from May 21 through September 6, 2026. Occupying three distinct locations within the Barbican complex, the Silk Street Entrance, The Curve gallery, and Car Park 5, the exhibition will transform the Brutalist cultural landmark into a sequence of cinematic environments examining architecture, infrastructure, climate futures, and planetary urbanism. Developed in collaboration with writers, scientists, filmmakers, musicians, and performers, the project brings together large-scale projections, LED installations, sound environments, graphic narratives, costumes, and speculative artifacts to explore how fiction and spatial storytelling can shape conversations around environmental and technological change.
Conceived as an immersive journey through interconnected speculative worlds, In Other Worlds extends Young's long-standing practice at the intersection of architecture, cinema, and environmental research. Rather than presenting fixed predictions, the exhibition approaches fiction as a tool for rehearsing possible futures and reconsidering relationships between cities, landscapes, machines, and ecological systems. The spatial experience begins at the Barbican's Silk Street entrance with a public LED installation featuring animated portraits of fictional workers inhabiting one of the exhibition's imagined futures. From there, visitors move through The Curve gallery and into the Barbican's infrastructural interiors, where large-scale moving-image installations construct narratives around extraction, climate adaptation, automation, and collective survival.
Among the central works is World Machine (2026), a newly commissioned film created for the Barbican and presented on a 12-meter-wide projection. Combining CGI and live-action footage, the project speculates on a future in which renewable energy systems and AI data centers reshape landscapes at a planetary scale. Other works revisit questions of urban density, territorial occupation, and environmental restoration through speculative architectural scenarios. Planet City (2021), first presented at the Tribeca Festival, imagines the entire global population consolidated into a single hyper-dense metropolis while the remainder of the Earth is returned to wilderness. Meanwhile, The Great Endeavour (2023), previously exhibited at the Venice Architecture Biennale, visualizes a global carbon-removal infrastructure conceived as a collective planetary project.
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The exhibition also includes After the End (2024), developed in collaboration with Aboriginal actor and activist Natasha Wanganeen. Structured as a speculative 50,000-year timeline, the project traces Australia's transformation from Indigenous histories and colonization toward imagined futures shaped by renewable energy infrastructures and repopulated territories. Presented alongside Young's illustrated narratives and speculative artifacts, the works collectively position architecture and urbanism as cultural and environmental systems operating across territorial and planetary scales.
The exhibition's interdisciplinary framework is reinforced through collaborations with writers, scientists, actors, and musicians. Following its London presentation, In Other Worlds will tour nationally and internationally as part of Barbican Immersive's broader program dedicated to contemporary culture, emerging technologies, and digital creativity.
In other exhibition news, the Sharjah Architecture Triennial presents A Journey into Architecture Archives: Baghdad, Damascus, Tunis, curated by George Arbid, on view from May 2 to July 12, 2026, at Al Qasimiyah School. Meanwhile, Kengo Kuma and Kengo Kuma & Associates have unveiled Earth | Tree at Copenhagen Contemporary, a site-specific installation developed with Danish wood manufacturer Dinesen inside a former industrial hall. In São Paulo, Eduardo Longo's futuristic Casa Bola has opened to the public for the first time as part of the ABERTO5 exhibition, which also includes a project focused on the city's Faria Lima corridor and its modern architectural landmarks.
