Exhibitions in the North
Creative TouristThis season, exhibitions across the North West feel attuned to the world beneath the world – the forces and stories shaping how we see, feel and imagine.
At The Whitworth, Yuki Kihara restages colonial imagery and evolutionary theory through Sāmoa’s gender-diverse communities, unpicking archival narratives. At PINK, Chris Thompson’s The Vessel approaches the archive differently: a fictional, walk-in cabinet of curiosities where visitors open drawers and panels to assemble meaning from fragments of history, pop culture and institutional power.
FACT pushes these questions into the digital present. Bassam Issa Al-Sabah builds fantastical CGI worlds where online identities distort into dreamlike forms, while Nina Davies transforms a hospital’s “digital twin” into a sci-fi investigation of memory and imagined futures. Another exhibition at FACT, Can Meeple Escape the Neurophoria?, widens the frame, asking what happens when intelligent technologies start tilting our sense of self and our ability to make choices.
At The Lowry, The Guardians of Living Matter shifts the conversation into the biological. This immersive environment imagines an unlikely alliance between artificial intelligence and mycelium networks, sketching a future grounded in care, imagination and collective action.
Using fantasy, science, worldbuilding and reimagined archives, these shows challenge the structures that shape experience, opening new ways to understand the worlds we inhabit and the ones still taking shape.
