Meet Larry Achiampong, the artist whose work engages in dialogue with video games

Video games are not strangers to museums and galleries. Over the last few years games have landed in places like the V&A and the MoMA. But it’s still relatively rare to have games sharing the same space as other artworks, let alone for a gallery to ensure they’re playable for the audience, just like they are in their living rooms.

Merging the art world with the video game world comes instinctively for contemporary artist Larry Achiampong, however, whose works span multiple disciplines from sculpture to film to collages and more. While postcolonialism and pan-Africanism are key themes in the British Ghanaian artist’s works, so are video games, having been a part of his life since growing up in East London and Essex in the late 80s and early 90s.

“Even when I think about it now, I felt like I didn’t entirely have a place where I totally fit in,” Achiampong tells me when we meet at the Copperfield Gallery in South London in the first half of this year. “The space of gaming allowed a chance for me to exist in a way where I felt accepted, compared to other kinds of spaces.”

Coming from a working class background in an era where film and TV were far less diverse than they are today, video games made for a better space in which Achiampong could explore his identity. Of course, games weren’t exactly diverse in representation back then either, but 8-bit pixels and more abstract characters like Pac-Man and Sonic (“we’re literally talking about a hedgehog that runs!”) made it less of a barrier and offered a degree of agency.