Inside Keiken’s giant mask, you wait to be reborn

Every roleplaying game starts in the same room: the one where you pick a body. Keiken built that room at architectural scale. The Divine Puppeteer, now installed at BALTIC in Gateshead, is a monumental fiberglass mask you step up to and wear; for 11 minutes, a binaural sound journey puts you in the head of a deity sitting in a waiting room, flicking through a catalogue of possible bodies and preparing to be reborn. A Morphogenic Angel? Something more like a snail? The announcement asks: what might it mean to move between species, bodies and forms of consciousness?

The mask has a past life of its own. It premiered at Manchester International Festival in 2025, made with the footballer Ella Toone , whose inner world supplies the story, with script and sound by Keiken's Isabel Ramos. At BALTIC it returns with a newly commissioned sound work that folds it into the collective's larger cosmology, the one Killscreen has been tracking since Morphogenic Angels imagined post-human bodies 1,000 years out. The show around it, Seeds, Stones, and Future Bones, is Keiken's first major exhibition in a UK public gallery, and it includes Morphogenic Angels: Chapter 1, the collective's science-fiction action game whose combat system is subverted into a display of how your energy affects the people around you. The sculptural and audio work grew partly from research with marginalized communities, including the Japanese deafblind community.

Choosing a body becomes slow, public, and a bet on collective belief, the collective described to Killscreen in a 2021 conversation about CGI cinema.

Entry is free, Wednesday through Sunday, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., through Jan. 17, 2027.