We're excited to announce our 2026 exhibitions programme, featuring new artworks, locally embedded participatory projects, and major installations by emerging and established artists! Using playable game worlds and AI technologies, these 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. Discover the full programme →

• 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 duo ONLY SLIME presents an expansion of their interactive game-opera, AFTERLIFE, inviting you 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.

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 press or media enquiries, please email press@fact.co.uk

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. Plan your visit.

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 you 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 us to interrogate the motivations behind the pursuit of artificial intelligence and life, and to examine the ways human ambition and ego shape the worlds we construct. Plan your visit.

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, you 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. Plan your visit.

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: Local Superstar

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 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. Their sound expands and subverts what existing South Asian musical traditions can hold - centring women and queer voices, disrupting inherited hierarchies, and opening congregative space for complexity, joy, and refusal. The film element imprints on the visual language of traditional paintings that illustrate Valmiki scripture and storytelling, often featuring fantastical compositions and depictions of deities and supreme beings that exist across multiple worlds. When visiting, you're invited to enter Saheli’s large-scale fabricated tour bus, decorated with neon lights and garlands in homage to some of the vehicular spectacles of India. Here, you 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

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. Plan your visit.