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 a new commission titled Local Superstar, Seema Mattu assembles Saheli: a band of South Asian, queer musicians who seek to demonstrate how collective music-making can foster connection, co-creation, and new queer, diasporic sonic imaginaries.
