Image: Keiken, Artwork Still, Morphogenic Angels: Chapter 1 (2023). Courtesy of the artist
Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead is presenting "Keiken: Seeds, Stones, and Future Bones" in its Level 2 gallery from September 19, 2026, through January 17, 2027. According to Baltic, it is the first major exhibition in a UK public gallery by the artist collective Keiken.
Led by Hana Omori, Keiken takes its name from the Japanese word for "experience." The collective works collaboratively, building immersive worlds through embodied storytelling, empathetic technologies and world-building, and moves between games, films, installations and performance.
At the centre of the show is "Morphogenic Angels: Chapter 1," a single-player science-fiction action-adventure game, shown with sculptural pieces and newly commissioned sound work inside an installation environment designed specifically for Baltic. The works deal with consciousness, transformation and the limits of human experience.
The game's universe is set a thousand years from now, in a time and place beyond present-day political, social and economic conditions. Its inhabitants have extended their abilities by organically re-engineering their cells and drawing on non-human forms of consciousness. Post-human beings in this world are called "angels" and take from many sources of awareness, among them ancestral, bodily, extraterrestrial, animal, natural, cellular and cosmic. The narrative follows two characters, Yaxu and Anamt'u'ul, in a love story stretching across several evolutionary life cycles.
Visitors can step into and explore this world. The gameplay uses an inverted combat system that shows how a player's energy affects others, and the game is also designed to work as live cinema, turning play into a shared event. The surrounding sculpture and audio grew out of the artists' ongoing research with marginalised communities, including the Japanese deafblind community. The sculptural work looks at perception and non-hierarchical forms of knowledge, giving material shape to systems that are usually hard to see, such as collective consciousness and communication beyond words.
Baltic is open Wednesday to Sunday from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., and entry to the exhibition is free. The gallery has linked the show to its 2023 exhibition "Larry Achiampong: Gaming Room," which looked back at the consoles and games of the 1980s and 1990s.
