Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art is to present the first major UK public gallery exhibition by artist collective Keiken, transforming its Level 2 gallery into an immersive science-fiction world spanning gaming, sculpture and sound.
Opening on 19th September 2026, Seeds, Stones, and Future Bones centres on Morphogenic Angels: Chapter 1, Keiken’s science-fiction, single-player action-adventure game, presented alongside sculptural works and a newly commissioned sound installation.
Led by Hana Omori, Keiken, meaning “experience” in Japanese, works across games, film, installation and performance, using world-building and emerging technologies to explore consciousness and alternative ways of experiencing and understanding the world.
For Baltic, the collective is creating a site-specific environment that allows the digital universe of Morphogenic Angels to spill out from the game and into the physical gallery.
Set 1,000 years in the future, Morphogenic Angels imagines a world beyond our current political, social and economic structures. Humans have acquired expanded capabilities through the organic re-engineering of their cells, allowing them to access forms of non-human consciousness.
In this future, post-human entities are understood as “angels”, drawing equally on ancestral, bodily, extraterrestrial, animal, natural, cellular and cosmic forms of consciousness rather than placing human experience at the centre of everything.
At the heart of this speculative universe, however, is something considerably more familiar: a love story.
Following its central characters Yaxu and Anamt’u’ul, Morphogenic Angels traces a relationship across multiple evolutionary lifecycles, using science fiction to think about transformation, connection and what consciousness might become.
Visitors won’t simply watch this future unfold. They will be invited to enter and navigate it themselves.
The game features a subverted combat system designed to reveal how a player’s energy and actions affect others. At Baltic, gameplay will simultaneously operate as a form of live cinema, turning what would normally be an individual gaming experience into something collectively watched and experienced.
That universe then extends beyond the screen.
Sculpture and newly commissioned audio works will occupy the surrounding gallery, drawing on Keiken’s ongoing research with marginalised communities, including the Japanese deafblind community. The works investigate perception, post-verbal communication and non-hierarchical forms of knowledge — questioning the assumption that sight, sound or spoken language should dominate how we understand and communicate with one another.
Rather than functioning simply as props from the game, these physical objects become fragments of the future Keiken has imagined: attempts to give material form to otherwise invisible systems, including collective consciousness and alternative forms of communication.
It all makes Seeds, Stones, and Future Bones less an exhibition about imagining what technology might look like in 1,000 years and more about imagining what we might become alongside it.
Keiken: Seeds, Stones, and Future Bones, 19th September 2026 – 17th January 2027
Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art
About
Keiken are a winner of The Lumen Prize (2024) and the Chanel Next Prize (2021), and are artists in residence at Somerset House, London. Recent solo and group exhibitions include: PHI, Montréal (CA), Manchester International Festival (UK), Le Cube Garges (FR), Zeppelin Museum (DE) (2025), Amos Rex, Helsinki (FL) (2024), 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa (JP), KANAL–Centre Pompidou, Brussels (BE), Helsinki Biennial (FL), HAU, Berlin (DE) (2023), CO Berlin (DE); Wellcome Collection, London (UK); ARKO Art Centre, Seoul (KR); Julia Stoschek Collection, Dusseldorf (DE); Onassis, Athens (GR) (2022); Thailand Biennale, Korat (TH); HEK, Basel (CH); 17th Venice Architecture Biennale, Venice (IT); Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, Tokyo (JP) (2021); FACT, Liverpool (UK); transmediale, Haus der Kulturen der Welt HKW, Berlin (DE) (2020); ICA, London (UK); Jerwood Arts, London (UK) (2019).
