Feature: SAHJAN KOONER: (DARKFOREST) THE ZONE OF GHOSTS
Perhaps everyone remembers building imaginary worlds during a childhood sleepover. A pile of cushions became mountains, a blanket transformed into a cave, and a hand-drawn map led us somewhere new. As we played, the story unfolds. We added characters, objects and adventure, building a world together.
Those nights left us with a feeling where anything was possible.
Looking back, giving ordinary objects magical meanings isn’t so different from what a museum does. Long before we knew what a museum was, we were already collecting, imagining and telling stories. If that instinct has always been there, perhaps the question is not what a museum is, but what else it could become.
At FACT Liverpool, Sahjan Kooner’s (darkforest): The Zone of Ghosts explores the question with young people from Liverpool and Leigh. The exhibition returns to the spirit of play, imagining museums not as places preserving the past but as places where stories and objects we create together.
Stepping into the gallery, the space appears almost dark. The sound of the forest guides you forward. As you move further in, a mist of soft green spreads across the floor, encouraging you to continue. You follow the winding path like walking through a forest trail. It is never a straight route. The path eventually opens into a clearing. Beneath a spotlight sits a table with four empty chairs. As you move closer, a board game comes into view, as if another group of players has just left or as if the next adventure is about to begin. Before you turn a single card or touch any object, the exhibition has already drawn visitors into its world.
The exhibition invites young people to imagine an alternative museum through board games, storytelling and object-making. Working with young people aged 12–19, Kooner asked them to become collaborators. They created new stories, imagined collections and new ways of thinking about what a museum could be. The young people brought their own ideas and experiences into the workshops, exploring museum collections, storytelling and play. Together, they imagined a museum grounded in their identities, mythologies and dreams, not inherited narratives.
Drawing inspiration from Wigan Museum's collection, the board game reimagines the museum as an adventure we take together. Instead of encountering objects behind glass, players discover them through movement, conversation and shared decisions. The game begins in the Museum of Life, a place where every story gathers before it fracturing into two worlds. As a group, players travel toward the Dark Forest, collecting scattered artefacts and placing them in sanctuaries to restore what slipped away. A wizard, a linguist, an AI and a time traveller lead the players through imagined landscapes and sudden twists. They do not compete, they collaborate.
Throughout the exhibition, players draw cards posing deceptively simple questions. What makes an ideal museum? Who is a museum for? What stories deserve to be collected, kept and remembered? These questions become conversations. We continually imagine and remake the museum collectively. The game invites us to share memories, opinions and possibilities to imagine what a museum could become.
Yet the cards do more than explain the rules. Like fragments of a fantasy novel, they weave metaphors and vivid imagery into the journey. "A fog swallows the players until objects light their way." "An owl asks which object in your own life matters most." "A whispering gallery wonders," and "Museums remember, but who decides what to forget?" The text draws a picture inviting players to drift between imagination and reflection. With birdsong, footsteps and rustling leaves filling the gallery, the board game begins to feel like wandering through a living forest.
Over months of workshops, imagined artefacts took physical form through clay modelling, 3D scanning, storyboarding, costume design and filmmaking. The making process became part of the exhibition itself. Every object carried the traces of collective imagination and storytelling. Inspired by Wigan Museum's collection, the young participants invented their own artefacts instead of reproducing existing ones. Each object has its own story, history and impossible power.
One artifact preserves LeBron James' footprint, signature and even his glutes after a visit to Wigan. Playful, absurd, and strangely tender. These objects ask what deserves preservation and who decides what counts as heritage. The exhibition answers through humour, imagination and play rather than fixed definitions. These handmade objects travel through the board game, moving between clay, digital animation and 3D printing, gathering new stories each time they change form.
A screen guides visitors through the adventure with narration, magical music and animated versions of the handmade clay artefacts. Their uneven surfaces and fingerprints remain visible, reminding us every museum object begins with someone's act of making and imagining. Visitors move between the tabletop game and its digital counterpart. The two versions echo one another. Moving between craft and technology in much the same way museums shift between physical collections and digital archives.

Small recesses sit inside the gallery walls and reveal themselves as visitors move closer. 3D‑printed versions of the clay artefacts rest inside them. Their surfaces catch the light, shimmering gently as if waiting to be discovered.

The effect recalls digital adventure games, where a glowing object quietly signals a clue, a story or something worth discovering.

The museum adopts the same language of invitation. These objects seem to wait patiently for someone's curiosity. Like any museum collection, they come alive when someone pauses, looks closely and begins to imagine the stories they might hold.

Their imagined museum includes teleporting artefacts, protective museums and magical objects. Ideas challenge what museums we expect to preserve. Fantasy becomes another way of asking what museums could be rather than what they already are. A museum is not simply a place that stores objects. They are stories. Likewise, a board game doesn’t just play. It reads.
Kooner developed his wider practice on the belief imagination is "our most important form of technology." In this project, he uses imagination to rethink museums, collections and the stories they tell.
As Paul Booth argues, board games communicate not only through written text but through the act of play itself. Meaning emerges as players negotiate rules, stories and one another. In The Zone of Ghosts, players shape the museum through their participation. The young people don’t inherit its stories, but remake them through fantasy, conversation and play. Clara Fernández-Vara reminds us games speak through what they depict and through how players engage with them. The Zone of Ghosts rather than asking visitors simply to look at museum objects, it invites them to play, speculate and imagine together.
For Kooner, the project opened a chance to explore the museum’s histories and futures with young people to hear how they imagine themselves inside it. They reflect on the depth and ownership they built around the stories and objects they created.
Fantasy becomes more about seeing museum objects differently. Participants invent myths, personal memories and impossible stories around the collection, interrupting and reshaping familiar narratives. Objects carry multiple meanings rather than a single official history.
This movement between the handmade and the digital sits directly within Kooner’s wider practice. Kooner has recently been exploring their ancestral village in North India through science fiction and fantasy, bringing together personal experience, technology and ecology. They treat the village as a place where memory and speculation meet, working with others to shift and rewrite its histories and imagine how its futures might unfold.

Through video and installation, Kooner builds expansive environments shaped by inherited memories and speculative futures. Their work explores love, hope and imagination while questioning the technological and social structures influencing everyday life. This approach continues in The Zone of Ghosts, where stories move across generations, objects carry social and material histories, and different futures take shape through collaboration.

On one side, visitors play the board game; on the other, a campfire creates a place to rest, gather and think about different futures together. Like the stories we shared during childhood sleepovers, the campfire becomes a place where memories, myths and imagined futures take shape collectively. It suggests museums grow not only through objects but through conversations.

The space also acts as both a gathering area and a fantasy film set for a new work Kooner and the young collaborators made. Through character development, costume design, scriptwriting, performance and filmmaking, The Zone of Ghosts continues to grow beyond the board game. The film launches on Thursday 23 July and joins the exhibition from Friday 24 July, adding another layer to this expanding world.

Visitors can listen to The Inside Zone podcast, a recorded conversation between Kooner and FACT’s Learning Team about their work with the young people. Dressed as NASA engineers, the Learning Team discusses how they listened, worked and built the project together. They described co-production not as a single workshop but as a long and evolving process.
Over twelve months, the group explored what a museum means today and how young people imagine themselves within it. They activated museum collections through their own ideas, moving between online culture, clay, costume-making, film and digital technology. Clay objects became 3D scans and then digital forms, carrying the young people’s ideas between physical and virtual spaces.
Kooner explains: “We try to build a tempo where discovery happens, a discovery of the capacity to make something, and a discovery of how to exchange with other people.” They compare the process to an exquisite corpse, where one person begins a story or structure and another continues it. This method reflects the exhibition itself: its world grows through shared imagination, making and exchange.
The campfire captures this process. Kooner describes the dreamlike feeling of sharing stories just before nightfall, when familiar things can suddenly appear different. At the heart of the project lies what they call “the freedom to dream.”
Around the campfire, beside shimmering clay artefacts and across the board game, visitors imagine institutions otherwise. If museums have traditionally preserved the past, The Zone of Ghosts proposes something equally vital: museums can also rehearse futures. Imagination becomes a way of making those futures collectively. Like the stories we built as children, this museum never stands still. We add another memory, another object and another possibility.
Visitors can continue the adventure through the digital version of The Zone of Ghosts on FACT’s website. Its landscapes, objects and clues allow the imagined world to remain open after visitors leave the exhibition.
Sahjan Kooner’s (darkforest): The Zone of Ghosts runs at FACT Liverpool from 22 May to 16 August 2026. Developed with Wigan Museums, Global Friends, Unity Youth and Young Inspectors, the project includes board-game design by An Endless Supply and digital-game development by Poppy Curran Jones.
The exhibition is commissioned by FACT Liverpool and supported by Wigan Museums, Global Friends and Unity Youth, with funding from the PH Holt Foundation, the Eleanor Rathbone Charitable Trust, the DWF Foundation, the Chrimes Family Charitable Trust and Art Fund through the New Perspectives partnership.
SAHJAN KOONER: (DARKFOREST) THE ZONE OF GHOSTS
22 May 26 — 16 Aug 26
FACT, Liverpool Gallery 1