A speculative future of the planet, where improbably the entire population lives in a single city and, overlooking the need to feed them, the rest of the planet is left to rewild itself.
It’s an art exhibition at the Barbican, taking over their Curve gallery and spilling into the car park, with an atmospheric installation that either takes ages to view if you do everything or can be walked through in under a quarter of an hour if you don’t like queuing for the headsets.
It’s also not the work of one artist but is packed full of contributors, with a list of names in bold text dotted throughout the announcement that left it looking like a bad outbreak of literary blackheads in print. It’s one of those exhibitions that looks and sounds good but is more atmosphere than art, with only a few moderately large installations that we’re told have meaning within the storyline.
They tell a story of a future world where industry is used to remove carbon from the atmosphere, but rather than an agrarian society where people live with a minimal footprint on the planet, we’re instead living in a megalopolis straight out of Blade Runner or Judge Dredd.
The main gripe is the use of very slow video to fill a lot of the exhibition. It’s just so very, very, very, very slow and, candidly, boring after a while. I wasn’t the only one who started watching, then wandered off after a few minutes of watching cameras very slowly panning across computer-generated landscapes.
Did I mention it was slow?
The handful of sculptures are good, especially the curious freestanding piles of buildings, and the walkthrough forest.
The section in the car park tries to tell us how all the imagined futures we just saw could come true, but then, rather than delivering a message of hope about solar, wind and nuclear, it turns negative and overlooks how incredibly fast we are already moving towards a net-zero future in energy at least.
Yes, we can go faster, but that needs people to be motivated by optimistic visions of how we can make a difference. More hope, please – it’s really quite motivating to do more.
I would say the exhibition is atmospherically laid out, even if the objects within it aren’t entirely that amazing in themselves. Go for the atmosphere, and leave the lecturing to another day.
The exhibition, In Other Worlds, is at the Barbican Arts Centre until 6th September 2026.
Standard Ticket: £20.50
Students: £16.50
Universal or Pension Credit: £11.50
Under 16: £6
Under 5s: Free
Details here.