EVENT: WORLDGLIMPSING (OCTOBER 3 2025-2026, SWEDEN AND THE NETHERLANDS)
Worldglimpsing
ArkDes, Skeppsholmen, Exercisplan, Stockholm, Sweden
Exercisplan 4, Skeppsholmen, Stockholm
3 October 2025 – 2026 (Stockholm chapter), with the second chapter opening at Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam, in 2026.
Tuesday–Sunday 10:00–18:00; Tuesday & Friday late opening until 20:00
Programme highlights:
Opening: Friday, 3 October 2025, 6–8pm (music by Queen E; hosted by Ruccola Hängbjörk).
A Magic Circle: Saturday, 4 October 2025, 2–3pm — Johanna Koljonen, OMSK Social Club, James Taylor-Foster.
Performance: PLAY OVERLAY by Teo Ala-Ruona, Thursday, 7 November 2025, 6–7:30pm.
ArkDes’s new exhibition, Worldglimpsing: Roleplay and the Design of Alternate Realities, opens today in Stockholm with a thesis that museums have already absorbed what game culture has been testing for decades: world-building and roleplay are now standard tools of contemporary art and design, not fringe curiosities.
Co-organised with Rotterdam’s Nieuwe Instituut, Worldglimpsing treats “worlding” and “roleplay” as civic techniques: ways to model politics, intimacy, care, identity, and infrastructure through playable scenarios, scripted encounters, and simulated spaces.
At the centre of the exhibition is OUR BR00D by OMSK Social Club, a large-scale, museum-commissioned “Real Game Play” (RGP) whose mechanics foreground collective decision-making and responsibility. Visitors enter The Crave, a shared setting where an AI caregiver (“M0ther”) and an AI infant (“Br00d,” “born” on 1 May 2025) anchor a rehearsal of social life under ecological and technological pressure. The work is staged in two formats: a short, low-intensity version facilitated by ArkDes hosts and a three-hour, high-intensity session run by OMSK. This articulation makes the piece legible both as performance and as playable social design (booking is required for the extended sessions). The commission is produced by ArkDes and Nieuwe Instituut, with development support from Shedhalle (Zürich), Callie’s (Berlin), and Haus der Kunst (Munich), and will travel to Rotterdam in 2026.
The wider exhibition aligns game simulations with adjacent media and practices: photographic series, participatory scripts, sound works, documentation of live roleplay, and immersive films. The lineup—Ayoung Kim, Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, Ed Fornieles with Nina Runa Essendrop, Lu Yang, Natalie Paneng, OMSK Social Club, Reinis Hofmanis, Simon Denny, Tom K Kemp, Trojan Horse, and ¥€$i PERSE / Neurodungeon, among others—underscores how game engines, avatar performance, MMO aesthetics, and live action role play have migrated from subcultural spaces into national museums.
In other words, what used to be framed as “game art” is now simply contemporary art. The curatorial language makes this explicit: design is treated not as a pipeline for objects but as a speculative practice that reorganises behaviour, institutions, and futures.
Public events extend the playable brief. A conversation titled “A Magic Circle” (with Johanna Koljonen, OMSK Social Club, and curator James Taylor-Foster) foregrounds the conceptual vocabulary the field has inherited and reworked from game studies, while Teo Ala-Ruona’s PLAY OVERLAY (7 November) addresses the everyday choreography of roles—their construction, fracture, and shedding—through performance in collaboration with MDT.
Institutionally, the exhibition matters. It is presented in two chapters across two national museums dedicated to architecture, design, and digital culture, with ArkDes launching the Stockholm chapter now and Nieuwe Instituut opening the Rotterdam chapter in 2026. The scale and ambition of this initiative is unprecedented, cementing the centrality of game driven art in the European context.
All images and videos courtesy of Nieuwe Instituut.