LIVERPOOL.- 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.
February 6–April 26, 2026
Can Meeple Escape the Neurophoria?
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. 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 and investigates the evolving relationship between humans and intelligent technologies. Supported by the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia and the John Ellerman Foundation.
March 20–August 16, 2026
Rachel Maclean
They’ve Got Your Eyes is a major new commission by celebrated 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 work interrogates the motivations behind the pursuit of artificial intelligence and examines how ego shapes the development of technology. Drawing parallels between today's AI boom and the Victorian era's fascination with invention and discovery, the installation mixes scientific aesthetics with the fantasy of faerie folklore to create a vivid, uncanny world where authorship and identity begin to slip. Supported by the Scottish Government’s Festivals Expo Fund and Creative Scotland.
March 20–August 16, 2026
ONLY SLIME
Boundary-pushing artist duo ONLY SLIME (Toby Pfeil and Claudia Cox) 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. 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.
May 22–August 16, 2026
Sahjan Kooner
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. The exhibition expands on Kooner’s project as part of an ongoing collaboration between FACT, Wigan Museum, and Global Friends.
September 18, 2026–February 14, 2027
Rae-Yen Song
At FACT, Rae-Yen Song presents the artist’s most ambitious project to date, featuring newly commissioned sculptures, textiles, print, sound, and moving image works. Exploring diasporic mythologies and more-than-human kinship, the exhibition transforms the gallery into a subaquatic world populated by primordial beings and artefacts shaped by the Song family’s lore. Co-commissioned with Tramway (Glasgow).
September 18, 2026–February 14, 2027
Seema Mattu
Seema Mattu presents Local Superstar, a new participatory commission spanning film, installation, and music. The project centres on Mattu’s quest to form a band of South Asian, queer musicians, and their journey towards becoming Saheli: a folk-punk entity whose music and performances cultivate community, connection, and belonging while reshaping dominant narratives and imagining new musical futures. Co-commissioned with Eastside Projects (Birmingham) and Focal Point Gallery (South Essex).
