FACT Liverpool Unveils a Year of Immersive, Interactive Exhibitions for 2026
FACT Liverpool has announced 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.
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.”
For more information about FACT Liverpool visit fact.co.uk.
