So much of our art is tied to our ending. With climate disaster a terrible reality, it’s difficult to look to the future with any sense of optimism, and even harder to imagine any beauty in it. Across six imagined worlds, artist and director Liam Young has gathered an impressive cast of collaborators to imagine a narrative beyond our decline. Writers and performers include Diego Luna, Lisa Joy, Maxine Peake, Richard Ayoade, Jeffrey Wright, and many more. Through moving image, soundscapes, readings, models and immersive spaces, we are encouraged to reflect on the way we perceive the future the role we might play in shaping it.
The first world, titled “World Machine”, centres around a new film directed by Young, which is projected across the entire wall of a room filled with miniatures and costumes. All imagine a world which has been entirely incorporated into a giant computer. Every rock, mineral, and flora has been utilised to fuel man’s final creation. Bizzarely uniformed figures are seen assembling this machine in fire and darkness before we pan across immense structures, modern cities recast as circuit boards. In the room the rocks have merged with circuitry and fabrics are hewn from mutated earth materials. Dioramas illustrate how this world harvests itself. It’s a stark vision of the apotheosis of mankind’s designs: a world corrupted to it’s core.
From this tragic technological endpoint, the next world imagines “After the End”, presenting an alternate path; a story of reclamation and restoration. Young co-authors with Aboriginal author and activist Natasha Wanganeen a striking exploration of technologically advanced environmental restoration through the lens of aboriginal culture and faith. The film piece is a bright, digital vision of how such work and such a future might look, whilst the physical items in the room emphasise earthly textures and fabrics. A mesmerising corridor of light ushers you into a new world; one that exists on the other side of environmental collapse, and it’s far from dystopian.
The concept of the third world “Planet City” may feel claustrophobic. In a bid to minimise environmental impact, all humans have moved into one immense city, surrendering the rest back to nature. 10 billion people speaking 12 thousand languages, all living together. The concept is brought to life through beautifully designed models, an extraordinary moving image piece and audio stories that suggest that future humans will value nature more for having lived in the megacity. They will take trips out to the wilderness and treat herds of Zebra’s and natural light as the spectacles they are. The greatest shift depicted here is not in living arrangements or habitat, but in attitude towards the natural world.
The fourth world is a pre-existing work; Young’s epic visualisation of the efforts needed to clean our air. “The Fourth Endeavor” is a four way projected image that overwhelms you with the scope of the work being done and suggests how these efforts might evolve. The grandeur of the imagery and the style of projection beautifully realises one of the core premises of the exhibition; the spectacle of saving the world from ecological apocalypse.
The exhibition is then broken as guests are required to cross one of the many architectural curiosities of the Barbican centre, a road through the core of the complex, to immerge in a car park that has been repurposed as an art space. With parking lines and pay-and-display machines still present, we enter the fifth and sixth worlds “Future Present” and “Emissary”. Both explore the current state of restoration work and urges the visitor to not see all of this as science fiction but a potential future.
It is in these last spaces that the exhibition offers it’s most urgent pleas. As mankind’s construction of the modern world and destruction of nature has been audacious, we are encouraged to consider restoration just as audaciously. If man is obsessed with giant machines and obscene structures, then why not use these desires to undertake the greatest work of healing ever accomplished. Before the end, we are encouraged to reflect on the building we inhabit. The Barbican centre is a brutalist wonder, a baffling and obscene monument constructed amongst the rubble of the second world war. Before releasing guests back to our world, Young asks what we might build in the ashes of the great environmental war.
Find out more and book tickets here: https://www.barbican.org.uk/whats-on/2026/event/in-other-worlds