Worldglimpsing: a new exhibition exploring roleplay and worlding opens in Stockholm

'Worldglimpsing' by Jonathan Castro Alejos, 2025.

This month, Worldglimpsing: Roleplay and the Design of Alternate Realities opened at ArkDes in Stockholm. A collaboration between ArkDes and Nieuwe Instituut, the exhibition shines light on the ways in which we inhabit our reality through designed worlds, and features a major new roleplay commission by OMSK Social Club.

Worldglimpsing explores two interwoven forms of creativity: worlding, the design of alternate worlds, and roleplay – the act of imagining and playing into being alternate versions of ourselves. Through a series of experimental works, the exhibition foregrounds roleplay and worlding as civic and political acts by which we imagine, rehearse, and embody the present – and the futures it sets in motion.

View of 'Worldglimpsing: Roleplay and the Design of Alternate Realities', 2025. Photo: Marco Cappelletti / Marco Cappelletti Studio. 2025.

Lu Yang, detail of 'DOKU – The Self', 2022. From 'Worldglimpsing: Roleplay and the Design of Alternate Realities', 2025. Photo: Marco Cappelletti / Marco Cappelletti Studio. 2025.

Photographic series, digital game simulations, participatory scripts, sound works, roleplay documentation, and immersive films invite you into worlds and roles shaped by groundbreaking artists and creatives. At the heart of all of these experiences is design – not in its conventional sense of producing objects or solutions, but as an expansive, speculative practice that leaves a mark on everything it touches. Here, design becomes a way of glimpsing worlds or reframing the one we know, including its societies, cultural behaviours, and identities.

View of 'Worldglimpsing: Roleplay and the Design of Alternate Realities', 2025. Photo: Marco Cappelletti / Marco Cappelletti Studio. 2025.

The works and experiences in this exhibition are not offering solutions to existential problems. Instead, they are glimpses—uplifting, profound, sometimes strange—into other ways of moving through the complexities of our moment, and ourselves. — James Taylor-Foster, curator

Worldglimpsing, an exhibition in two chapters, seeks to reveal how processes of creativity are just as valuable as their outcomes. It resists neat categorisation, much like the practices it presents. It invites you to be responsive, to come as you are, to stand in the shared world that we know and feel – and to sense what else could begin.

Reinis Hofmanis, detail of 'LARP' series, 2011-2024. From 'Worldglimpsing: Roleplay and the Design of Alternate Realities', 2025. Photo: Marco Cappelletti / Marco Cappelletti Studio. 2025.

Participants

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, ¥€$Si PERSE / Neurodungeon, and more.

Works in brief

Ayoung Kim: Step into the role of the Delivery Dancer and navigate a fictional, futuristic version of Seoul. 

Ayoung Kim, still from 'Delivery Dancer Simulation', 2022.

Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley: Dance or fight your way through the artist’s virtual world to reflect upon your own identities.

Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, 'I CANT FOLLOW YOU ANYMORE / BLACKTRANSREVOLUTION', 2023, video game still. Courtesy the artist and Public Gallery, London.

Ed Fornieles with Nina Runa Essendrop: Witness a fictional, embodied simulation of an extremist online community.

Ed Fornieles, still from 'Cel', 2019. Courtesy of the artist. Game Design: Nina Runa Essendrop, Ed Fornieles.

Lu Yang: For the first time in Sweden, experience three complete works from the DOKU series – portals into expansive alternate realities.

Lu Yang, still from 'DOKU – The Self', 2022. Courtesy of the artist.

Lu Yang, still from 'DOKU – The Flow', 2024.

Lu Yang, still from 'DOKU – The Creator', 2024. Courtesy of the artist.

Natalie Paneng: Revisit the utopias that we imagine as children and explore how different they can appear to be when we are older.

Natalie Paneng, still from 'A Visit to Nice Niceatopia (a world within Natalie’s Trifecta)', 2023, 2025. Courtesy of the artist.

Reinis Hofmanis: A unique photographic series documenting the blurry contours of ‘real life’ and roleplay. 

Reinis Hofmanis, 'Britta Hoyer as Youa the Manwolf', 'LARP', 2011. Courtesy of ArkDes.  Reinis Hofmanis.

Simon Denny: An homage to the all-pervasive importance of table top roleplay games in today’s cultural sphere.

Simon Denny, 'Dungeon map 8: Dungeons & Dragons gaming advertisements 1980s - 2010s', 2024. Courtesy the artist and Petzel Gallery, New York

Simon Denny, 'Dungeon artifact 2: Heroquest rack', 2024. Courtesy the artist and Petzel Gallery, New York.

Tom K Kemp: What might an undesirable afterlife look and feel like – and how might it be fixed?

Tom K Kemp, still from 'Dead Minutes', 2023. Courtesy of the artist.

Trojan Horse: “Sometimes one has to travel to another planet in order to understand what’s going on in one’s own.”

Trojan Horse, image from the Nörttimuotoilusymposium (The Nerdy Design Symposium), 2017. Courtesy of the artists.

¥€$Si PERSE / Neurodungeon: A speculative world through sound: a New Dark Age where big-tech have replaced nation states and rule through data.

Simon Denny, detail of 'Dungeon artifact 2: Heroquest rack', 2024 (front). ¥€$Si PERSE / Neurodungeon, detail of 'TOP 5: FAIRYTALES OF ECONOMIC GROWTH' (back). From 'Worldglimpsing: Roleplay and the Design of Alternate Realities', 2025. Photo: Marco Cappelletti / Marco Cappelletti Studio. 2025.

OMSK Social Club, detail of 'OUR BR00D', 2025. Photo: Marco Cappelletti / Marco Cappelletti Studio. 2025.

At the heart of the exhibition: OUR BR00D by OMSK Social Club

OUR BR00D is a unique opportunity to explore alternate versions of yourself as part of one of the most extensive roleplays commissioned in a museum. Become a part of the exhibition by playing this full-scale Real Game Play (RGP) – an interactive experience designed by OMSK Social Club, created for Worldglimpsing and jointly commissioned by ArkDes and Nieuwe Instituut.

This is an experimental work that positions roleplay as an expanded form of participatory design. It is a shared space in which visitors can test how we might live together, raise intelligence (both human and artificial), and negotiate responsibility when faced with ecological and technological transformations. The roleplay offers the possibility to rehearse choices and positions in an alternate version of the world we know.

OUR BR00D is a facilitated roleplay, which means the complete work can only be experienced with a guide. You can participate in a shorter, low-intensity experience facilitated by the museum's dedicated roleplay hosts. On select weekends, you can book to play the three hour-long high-intensity experience, facilitated by members of OMSK Social Club on site in Stockholm.

OMSK Social Club, detail of 'OUR BR00D', 2025. Photo: Marco Cappelletti / Marco Cappelletti Studio. 2025.

About OMSK Social Club

OMSK Social Club is a stewarded practice of collective storytelling. It involves a specific immersive improvised methodology, which they coined in 2017 as ‘Real Game Play’, encompassing collective immersion and speculative worlding. From these live iterations, they harvest media relics such as films, scripts, and large-scale video installations invoking states and gateways that could potentially be fiction or an as-of-yet unlived reality. The living installations that they create examine virtual egos, popular experiences, and cautionary tales.

Teo Ala-Ruona for ‘PLAY OVERLAY’ commissioned by ArkDes in collaboration with MDT, Sweden's Modern Dance Theatre. 2025. Courtesy of Zodiak.

Teo Ala-Ruona's PLAY OVERLAY – November 7, 2025

What are you wearing? PLAY OVERLAY by Teo Ala-Ruona is a solo performance about putting on everyday roles. How can they be shaped, fractured, slip away, and be shed?

Teo Ala-Ruona's choreography explores the friction between the body’s internal experience and the layers of clothing that we wear on top. Each garment that is removed, and each part of the body that is revealed, invites you to examine the ways in which you project categories upon others. Clothing is central to PLAY OVERLAY, framed here by Ala-Ruona as a technology that can be applied and discarded, layer by layer.

Learn more about the performance here.

View of 'Worldglimpsing: Roleplay and the Design of Alternate Realities', 2025. Photo: Marco Cappelletti / Marco Cappelletti Studio. 2025.

Notes to editors

ArkDes × Nieuwe Instituut
Worldglimpsing: Roleplay and the Design of Alternate Realitiesis a collaboration between two national museums with a shared focus on investigating an expanded field of design. The first chapter of the exhibition, hosted by ArkDes in Stockholm, opened on October 3, 2025. The second chapter, hosted by the Nieuwe Instituut, the Netherlands Museum for Architecture, Design and Digital Culture in Rotterdam, opens in 2026.

OUR BR00D by OMSK Social Club is a RGP (‘Real Game Play’) commissioned by ArkDes and Nieuwe Instituut as part of Worldglimpsing with developmental support from Shedhalle (Zürich), Callie’s (Berlin), and Haus der Kunst (Munich) as part of the Art & AI programme of the Kulturstiftung des Bundes. Following Stockholm, it will journey to Rotterdam in 2026.

PLAY OVERLAY by Teo Ala-Ruona, in collaboration with Pauliina Sjöberg, Tuukka Haapakorpi, and Ervin Latimer, is a performance that will be held in Stockholm on November 7, 2025. It is newly commissioned by ArkDes in collaboration with MDT with support from Zodiak — Centre for New Dance, Frame Contemporary Art Finland, and Arts Promotion Centre Finland.

Worldglimpsing at ArkDes is free of charge, including all public programmes and participation in OUR BR00D, throughout 2025. The exhibition runs from October 3, 2025, to August 30, 2026. Its second chapter opens in Rotterdam in 2026.

The first chapter of Worldglimpsing includes exhibition architecture by Daryan Knoblauch, graphic elements by Jonathan Castro Alejos, and has been supported with curatorial advice from Johanna Koljonen.