Sahjan Kooner’s Darkforest, currently upstairs at FACT, is probably the closest you’ll get to playing D&D as art in this life. Singles can explore but it takes four to really join in, and in an exhibition about play, imagination and the structure of modern reality, that’s probably fair.
The exhibition was created by the artist in collaboration with young people from Liverpool and Leigh. It feels as though they challenged each other along the way, and something really quite exquisite was born. A blend of ideas, somehow sewn together, inspired somewhere along the way by exquisite corpse creation techniques, intentionally or not, creates a product (maybe a tool? I’m deeply torn between these words but there’s nothing more appropriate in between) to facilitate the telling and creation of stories.
Those stories will be fictional. But they’re guided by the prompts, playing cards and tokens you play with. Post-game, there’s a camp fire and film, sharing the process behind this space, how the artists and collaborators worked together, and how it manifested as this..
All of it is linked to human decision and prompt. That feels like AI lurking in FACTs programming language again, but this time it’s a more manageable question: how do you choose to supply prompts? How much thought do you put into those questions put to Google Gemini in your search bar? Do you lead that conversation, or does it?
The tools of roleplaying tabletop gameplay (World of Warcraft, Dungeons and Dragons) are simple. Daunting at first, but simple. Play the game, respect the outcomes. In doing so you start to lead the narrative, learn the rules. No one starts those things knowing how to play, and that’s part of the point. Like life, you can design a character but the world will throw what it can at you and you just fight back.
It’s a really useful parallel with how to understand the world changing around us and the influence AI can have on our decisions, but if you begin to understand some of that as a game you can control, there’s joy to be had.
I don’t have a clue if any of what I’m saying here is true to the process or the thinking behind the installation, but that’s how it felt. Immersed in an exhibition where the negative space around the game table was as important as the table, and meant there really wasn’t much choice but to play it through.
On 24th July, the second part of this show is unveiled as Sahjan Kooner and his collaborators share a new film created in the space, inspired by it.
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Sahjan Kooner: (Darkforest) The Zone of Ghosts is open at FACT until 16th August 2026
Words, Patrick Kirk-Smith
