Looking for some immersive experiences across the UK this season? Here’s a selection of highlights happening across the UK over the next couple of months.

England

North England

Phantasmagoria: Folkloric Sculpture for the Digital Age – Leeds

Running until Sunday 30 August 2026

This major group exhibition brings together a new generation of artists exploring how digital technologies are reshaping what sculpture can be, and how it can be used to tell stories about our past, present, and future.

Exhibiting artists include Jürgen Baumann, Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, Nina Davies, Joey Holder, Joe Moss, Most Dismal Swamp, Steph Linn and Philip Speakman, Isaac Lythgoe and Rustan Söderling. Working across sculpture, moving image, performance, video games and installation, new and recent work in the exhibition shares a fascination with the collision of folklore and contemporary digital culture.

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AND Festival – Barnsley 

Friday 25  Sunday 27 September 2026

Abandon Normal Devices (AND) delivers a biennial festival of new cinema, digital culture and art. Attracting the most innovative artists from across the world and inviting them to work in collaboration with academics and anarchists from across the realms of technology, science and film. 

Returning this year it will deliver extraordinary art and site-responsive installations, collaborating with visionary artists, creative technologists and collaborators that push the boundaries of immersive experiences.  

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South West

SENTIENTS – Bristol

Saturday 18 July – Sun 13 September 

Bringing together award-winning and brand-new works, SENTIENTS is a collection of video games and virtual reality that invites you to see through other eyes. Discover wild imaginings and animal visions. Look through windows into a world in conflict. Adventure into strange lands. 

This exhibition was developed with a group of Young Curators from across Bristol and shaped by the themes, ideas and questions that mattered most to them. 

Featuring work from Marshmallow Laser Feast, Alice Bucknell, Demelza Kooij, Alan Kwan and David O’Reilly. 

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London

In Other Worlds

Running until Sunday 6 September 2026

Liam Young’s imaginary worlds take over various locations in the Barbican, inviting us to imagine what the future of humanity could look like, and the challenges and adventures to come. 

This is the first major UK solo exhibition of the filmmaker and speculative architect. Operating in the spaces between design, fiction and futures, these works immerse us in the consequences and opportunities of the decisions we make today. 

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Northern Ireland

Susan Hughes – A Feeling in the Blood – Belfast

Thursday 30 July 2026 – Monday 18 October 2026

An exhibition across a range of media including video, sculpture and installation by Belfast-based artist and fiddle player Susan Hughes. 

Displayed within the exhibition are a range of loaned objects from members of the public who responded to a call for artefacts and belongings which had a history relating to a personal experience of traditional Irish music over the years.

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Scotland

Pleasance Theatre / Assembly Festival – Edinburgh

Wednesday 5 – Monday 31 August

This August, Expand-funded artists DARKFIELD return to Edinburgh with three immersive shipping container shows: FLIGHT, COMA and ARCADE. FLIGHT explores the Many-Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics: two parallel realities unfold and two possible outcomes to the same journey. COMA invites audiences to slip into a collective dream. ARCADE is a choose your own adventure interactive show where you navigate a war torn world. Each show steals you away from reality for under 30 minutes.

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Sonica 2026 – Glasgow

Thursday 24 September – Monday 4 October

Sonica Glasgow, Cryptic’s flagship biennale festival, returns for 2026. Showcasing over 170 artists and musicians from 21 countries across the globe in 11 days of cutting-edge audiovisual art, visionary performances, installations and immersive experiences across iconic Glasgow venues.

This year’s festival also includes Sonica’s first-ever commissioned works: Rachel Maclean’s They’ve Got Your Eyes, co-commissioned by FACT Liverpool, and Martin Green’s Folding Songs, co-produced by Cryptic and Perth Theatre and Concert Hall.

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Wales

Evolver – Cardiff

Thursday 23 July – Sunday 30 August

Explore the branching human body at the scale of a forest.  Evolver is a 360º audio visual world by Marshmallow Laser Feast. which is experienced through an audio meditation, on screen and in virtual reality. Narrated by Cate Blanchett with Music by Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood, avant-garde artist Meredith Monk, late Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson and experimentalist Howard Skempton and spiritually informed ambient electronic maestro Jon Hopkins.

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