Deepa Mann-Kler spotlights menopause through immersive VR within wider women-led SXSW showcase

Highlights

• The Baby Factory Is Closed explores menopause through an embodied VR experience
• Project sits alongside three installations examining AI, memory and connection
• Showcase forms part of the UK’s Future Art and Culture programme

A personal story told through immersive form

Deepa Mann-Kler’s The Baby Factory Is Closed places audiences inside the experience of a British-born Sikh woman navigating menopause, using virtual reality to explore themes of identity, change and resilience. Combining real-time visuals, bio-haptic feedback and diasporic sound, the work reframes menopause as a moment of transformation while encouraging greater understanding of perspectives often absent from mainstream narratives.

A British-born Sikh woman navigating menopause, using virtual reality Deepa Mann-Kler

Positioned within a wider women-led programme

The project is presented as part of a UK showcase of immersive and AI works that examine what it means to be human in an increasingly technological world. Together, the line-up highlights how artists are using emerging tools to explore empathy, agency and emotional connection.

Shifting the role of AI from surveillance and control to reflection and human agencyKaren Palmer

Other installations exploring technology and experience

Karen Palmer’s Ascended Intelligence is an emotionally responsive XR and AI journey set in a 2030 smart cityKaren Palmer

Alongside Mann-Kler’s work, the showcase brings together three further installations that approach human experience through different technological lenses. Karen Palmer’s Ascended Intelligence is an emotionally responsive XR and AI journey set in a 2030 smart city, where a participant’s voice, tone and breath shape the unfolding narrative, shifting the role of AI from surveillance and control to reflection and human agency.

The piece captures fragments of a motion-captured pas de deux and transforms them through projectionLisa Jamhoury

In loss·y, Lisa Jamhoury presents an interactive installation combining sculpture, multichannel video and spatial audio developed with dance artist and creative technologist Clémence Debaig and Unwired Dance Theatre. The piece captures fragments of a motion-captured pas de deux and transforms them through projection, photogrammetry and computational techniques into an immersive memorial reflecting on the fading physical body in a technologically mediated world.

Visitors step into a phone booth to record messages about heartbreakNiki Harman

Meanwhile, Love Lost Hotline by Niki Harman blends immersive storytelling with audience participation. Visitors step into a phone booth to record messages about heartbreak, real or imagined, and receive a curated playback drawn from anonymous recordings by others, creating a collective archive of emotion that emphasises connection, vulnerability and shared experience through sound.

A shared exploration of empathy in the digital age

Taken together, the four works situate Mann-Kler’s menopause-focused piece within a broader international conversation about how immersive art can open space for reflection, connection and new ways of understanding lived experience. The four installations are presented by Future Art and Culture, curated by British Underground, and will travel to SXSW in Austin this March, with support from Arts Council England and the British Council.