Four decades of consoles move into the museum

The most radical gesture in Pixel Pioneers, the first exhibition Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen has devoted entirely to digital art, might be a couch. The Gaming Room (2021–ongoing), Larry Achiampong's contribution, rebuilds a domestic lounge inside the Depot, Rotterdam's publicly accessible art-storage building, out of the artist's own archive: consoles running from the 8-bit era to immersive 3D, plus games, books, music, film and memorabilia gathered across four decades. Three monitors are playable—Street Fighter among them—while a fourth runs a film in which, as Studio International's review describes, Achiampong recalls growing up Ghanaian in London, using games to shape mythic identities and to bond with a brother, and with the brother's avatars. The museum's announcement makes the framing explicit: video games as sites of memory, storytelling and togetherness, not objects behind glass. You are meant to sit down and stay a while.

The company is strong. Feng Mengbo's Long March: Restart (2008) runs as a 17-meter playable projection that drops a Red Army soldier into a side-scroller armed with Coke cans. Suzanne Treister's HEXEN tarot decks recount histories of countercultures, blockchain and AI, and Geert Mul's Horizons (2008)—restored for this show—rearranges the museum's landscape paintings into a database panorama that shifts as you move. Amira Gad curates; the show runs through September 13.

A decade ago we were writing about VR showrooms promising to turn your living room into a universal storefront. Achiampong runs that current in reverse: the museum becomes a living room, and the point of the screens is the people between them. That it happens inside a storage facility—the least domestic architecture imaginable, 155,000 objects racked overhead—only sharpens the argument. The collection holds paintings; the couch holds memory.