Forms of Life:
Beyond the Human

In 2026, ArtScience Museum presents a year-long season of exhibitions and programmes that explore the wider ecology of life beyond the human, attending to the multispecies worlds, systems, and intelligences that shape the planet alongside us. Rather than centering the human as the primary actor, Forms of Life: Beyond the Human considers how life is co-shaped by other living entities.

Inspired by writers such as Ed Yong, whose work reveals the sensory worlds of other species, and Anna Tsing, who foregrounds entanglement and coexistence, the season asks how we might learn to attend more carefully to forms of life beyond the human.

Forms of Life unfolds across a constellation of major exhibitions, including Insects: Microsculptures Magnified, NOX: Confessions of a Machine by Lawrence Lek, and Into the Ocean: Journey Beneath, a collaboration with OceanX. In these exhibitions, insects are revealed as vital participants in ecological systems. Artificial intelligence is explored through Lawrence Lek’s speculative worlds as an emerging actor within contemporary cultural and technological landscapes. OceanX’s research introduces audiences to the diversity of marine life and the ecological processes that connect surface waters, deep currents, and global climate. Later in the year, the season will also show how contemporary design practices are rethinking relationships between humans, living systems, and the environments we inhabit. Taken together, these exhibitions and programmes shift attention away from human exceptionalism toward the dense networks of relations through which life, technology and environments are shaped.

Extending beyond the gallery, Forms of Life also encompasses film programmes, workshops, talks, conferences, and festivals that illuminate multispecies worlds, reveal the lives of others, and imagine strange kinships. Public programmes and educational events explore entangled realities shaped by the co-presence of humans, machines, animals, plants, and microbial life, inviting audiences to consider intelligence, agency, and perception as distributed and shared conditions.

Forms of Life positions ArtScience Museum as a space for practising new ways of seeing and thinking, cultivating attentiveness, curiosity, and responsibility within a world shared with many forms of life.

Image Credit:
©Photography by Levon Biss.
Courtesy of the artist and Sadie Coles HQ, London. Originally commissioned by LAS Art Foundation.