FACT Liverpool, the UK’s leading centre for art, film, and creative technology, is pleased to announce its full 2026 exhibitions programme, featuring newly commissioned artworks, locally embedded participatory projects, and major installations by emerging and established artists.
Using playable game worlds and AI technologies, the exhibitions explore quests for greater meaning through the creation of new mythologies rooted in ancestral knowledge, more-than-human perspectives, and acts of congregation and resistance. Alongside the re-staging of existing works, FACT is delighted to present new commissions by Vytas Jankauskas, Sahjan Kooner, Rachel Maclean, Seema Mattu, and Rae-Yen Song 宋瑞渊.
Can Meeple Escape the Neurophoria? (Friday 6 February – Sunday 26 April 2026):
A thought-provoking group exhibition featuring artworks by Vytas Jankauskas, Joseph Wilk, and Jan Zuiderveld, curated by FACT’s 2025 Curator-in-Residence, Milia Xin Bi. Inspired by the worldbuilding dynamics of tabletop gaming, the exhibition investigates the evolving relationship between humans and intelligent technologies.
Rachel Maclean (Friday 20 March – Sunday 16 August 2026):
Celebrated Scottish artist Rachel Maclean premieres a new theatrical exhibition, They’ve Got Your Eyes, a satirical and eerie exploration of authorship, identity, and the power structures
behind artificial intelligence.
ONLY SLIME (Friday 20 March – Sunday 16 August 2026):
Boundary-pushing artist duo ONLY SLIME presents an expansion of their interactive game-opera, AFTERLIFE, inviting visitors to embody on-screen characters through motion capture and journey between fantasy computer-game worlds in search of a higher purpose.
Sahjan Kooner (Friday 22 May – Sunday 16 August 2026):
Working in collaboration with young people from youth clubs in Liverpool and Wigan, artist and worldbuilder Sahjan Kooner presents a newly commissioned project that explores the complex histories museums hold, inviting participants to reimagine them as
spaces where power, heritage, and storytelling collide.
Rae-Yen Song 宋瑞渊 (Friday 18 September 2026 - Sunday 14 February 2027):
Rae-Yen Song’s ambitious new exhibition •~TUA~• 大眼 •~MAK~• explores diasporic mythologies, more-than-human kinship, and a new pantheon of subaquatic deities informed by the artist’s family heritage.
Seema Mattu (Friday 18 September 2026 - Sunday 14 February 2027):
In new commission titled Saheli, Seema Mattu assembles a sonic collective of South Asian, queer, female, and non-binary identifying musicians to address misogyny, casteism, and queer erasure within South Asian musical expression, and celebrate community-building and belonging.
New Exhibitions Opening in 2026
Can Meeple Escape the Neurophoria?
Friday 6 February - Sunday 26 April 2026
Can Meeple Escape the Neurophoria? investigates the evolving relationship between humans and intelligent technologies, including AI. Designed to be playful and interactive while challenging ideas around surveillance, climate anxiety, and digital systems, the exhibition is inspired by the world-building dynamics of tabletop gaming, where environments shift according to players’ decisions. Featuring new and existing artworks by Vytas Jankauskas, Joseph Wilk, and Jan Zuiderveld, the exhibition is curated by FACT’s 2025 Curator-in-Residence, Milia Xin Bi, whose practice sits at the intersection of art, decentralised technologies, and contemporary subcultures.
Rachel Maclean: They’ve Got Your Eyes
Only Slime: AFTERLIFE
Friday 20 March - Sunday 16 August 2026
They’ve Got Your Eyes is a major new commission by Scottish artist Rachel Maclean, featuring the world premiere of a film created using AI models trained on her own image and artistic archive. Blending sculpture, generative imagery, and Maclean’s distinctive storytelling, the exhibition invites visitors into a vivid, uncanny world where authorship and identity begin to slip, and where power and ego distort understandings of artificial intelligence. Inspired by both today’s fascination with AI and the Victorian era’s love of invention, the installation mixes scientific aesthetics with the fantasy of faerie folklore to create an environment that feels playful, mesmerising and unsettling. They’ve Got Your Eyes asks audiences to interrogate the motives behind the pursuit of artificial intelligence and life, and to reflect on how human ambition and ego influence the worlds that emerge.
Co-commissioned by FACT Liverpool and Sonica Glasgow with support from 1646, The Hague. Supported by the Scottish Government’s Festivals Expo Fund and Creative Scotland.
AFTERLIFE by ONLY SLIME (Toby Pfeil and Claudia Cox) transforms their 2023 computer-game opera into an expansive new installation that transports audiences to a world that exists between life and death. Combining elements of Greek mythology and
contemporary internet culture, AFTERLIFE follows two 3D characters through fantasy underworlds and dream states on a desperate quest for existential meaning. Using motion tracking and playful mini-games, visitors become part of the work, influencing the characters and the paths they take. AFTERLIFE explores the shifting power dynamics between creator, player, and avatar, asking what control really looks like inside a system designed by someone else. Supported by the Office for Contemporary Art Norway.
Sahjan Kooner
Friday 22 May - Sunday 16 August 2026
Collaborating with young people from youth clubs in Liverpool and Wigan, Sahjan Kooner’s ongoing project invites participants to imagine the museums of tomorrow: places shaped by their identities, mythologies, and dreams. From protective museums to teleporting
artefacts, these speculative worlds position young people as curators and storytellers, transforming collections into spaces where power, heritage, and imagination collide. The exhibition expands on Kooner’s project as part of an ongoing collaboration between FACT, Wigan Museum, and Global Friends.
Rae-Yen Song 宋瑞渊: •~TUA~• 大眼 •~MAK~•
Seema Mattu: Saheli
Friday 18 September 2026 - Sunday 14 February 2027
Rae-Yen Song’s practice is an ever-evolving exercise in world-building, informed by personal ancestral mythologies, more-than-human politics, and science fact–fiction. At FACT, Song presents •~TUA~• 大眼 •~MAK~•, the artist’s most ambitious project to date,
featuring newly commissioned sculptures, textiles, print, sound, and moving image works. Weaving together history, memory, and imagination, the exhibition transforms FACT’s gallery into a subaquatic world populated by primordial beings and artefacts shaped by the Song family’s lore. At its centre is a giant inflatable macro-beast, an immense, ethereal creature that stretches across the gallery. Drawing on Chinese mythology, the work examines diasporic ancestral myths, abstracted homelands, and imagined future kin.
Co-commissioned with Tramway (Glasgow).
Seema Mattu presents Saheli, a new participatory commission spanning film, installation, and music. The project centres on Mattu’s quest to form a sonic collective of South Asian, queer, female, and non-binary musicians, and their journey towards becoming a folk-punk band whose music and performances unpack misogyny, casteism, colourism, and queer erasure within existing South Asian musical expression. The work draws on the visual language of traditional paintings that illustrate Valmiki’s scripture and storytelling, often featuring fantastical compositions and depictions of deities and supreme beings that exist across multiple worlds. Audiences are invited to enter a large-scale fabricated tour bus, decorated with neon lights and garlands in homage to those used by performers touring Punjab. Here, visitors can experience a documentary-style film soundtracked by the band and interwoven with digital animation and Mattu’s signature approach to world-building.
Co-commissioned with Eastside Projects (Birmingham) and Focal Point Gallery (South Essex).
Exhibitions Expanding into 2026
Bassam Issa Al-Sabah: THE MISSION IS THE END, THE END IS ALL I WANT!
Nina Davies: MEET ME IN THE DIGITAL TWIN
Until Sunday 22 February 2026
Commissioned by FACT Liverpool, two solo exhibitions by artists Bassam Issa Al-Sabah and Nina Davies reveal the tensions that emerge when digital representations begin to replace real experiences. Through speculative storytelling and immersive worldbuilding, the installations feature new sculpture, film, and digital animation, and examine how digital technologies flatten, fragment and distort the realities they seek to copy.
Nicola Triscott, Director and CEO at FACT, said:
In 2026, FACT continues exploring where art, technology and society intersect. Our year-round programme includes a major season of exhibitions exploring AI's creative possibilities and cultural implications, co-commissions with leading art institutions, and participatory projects with young people, while FACT's Studio/Lab enables artists to experiment with digital and immersive technologies. With a national and international reputation for ambitious programming at the forefront of artistic practice, FACT fosters inclusive and forward-thinking cultural dialogue.
Maitreyi Maheshwari, Head of Programme at FACT said:
Across 2026, FACT’s programme explores our quest for meaning and purpose in our current moment of political turmoil and technological anxiety. These exhibitions invite us to consider the complex entanglements of our age, where the mythological and the scientific, the more-than-human and the speculative coexist at every scale from the micro to the macro. They simultaneously invoke questions of how did we get here, where are we going, and how might we collectively create somewhere different? These ambitious works would not have been possible without our national and international co-commissioning partnerships and reflect a broader need for cultural collaboration.
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