Hamburg is set to become home to Europe's largest museum dedicated to digital and immersive art when the UBS Digital Art Museum opens in late 2025. Olivia Palamountain reports

Hamburg's HafenCity district will become home to Europe's first teamLab venue when the UBS Digital Art Museum opens in 2026, bringing the boundary-breaking digital art collective to the continent for the first time.

Housed in a purpose-built 6,500sqm space with 12m-high ceilings in Hamburg's HafenCity, the museum will showcase teamLab Borderless as its centrepiece.

This museum experience dissolves the traditional boundaries between artworks, allowing digital installations to flow between rooms, interact with each other and respond to visitors' movements.

teamLab, Infinite Crystal World © teamLab

teamLab, Light Vortex, Courtesy teamLab Borderless Tokyo © teamLab

The exhibition transforms spaces into living canvases where projections create forests of hanging lights, cascading waterfalls and blooming flowers that react to human presence. Rather than observing art from a distance, visitors become part of the installation itself, with their movements influencing the ever-changing digital landscapes around them.

The exhibition comes from Tokyo-based art collective teamLab, which creates immersive, interactive and technologically driven digital art experiences. Its venues across Asia and the Middle East have already broken visitor records, holding  Guinness World Records for the world's most visited museum dedicated to a single artist group, attracting 2.5 million visitors between April 2023 and March 2024.

teamLab, Crows are Chased and the Chasing Crows are Destined to be Chased as well: Cosmic Void, Courtesy teamLab Borderless Jeddah © teamLab

teamLab, Forest of Flowers and People: Lost, Immersed and Reborn © teamLab

Tech entrepreneur Lars Hinrichs, founder of career networking site XING, founded the project in Germany after experiencing teamLab's Tokyo venue.

The ambitious undertaking includes hundreds of projectors and cutting-edge technology to create a completely new level of sensory engagement.

teamLab, Forest of Resonating Lamps - One Stroke, Fire, Courtesy teamLab Borderless Jeddah © teamLab

Main entry of the UBS Digital Art Museum with media facade, Rendering © Thorsten Bauer, Studio Bauer

The museum is already selling advance tickets; find them here. It represents part of a growing immersive entertainment market estimated to be worth more than US$400 billion worldwide by 2030, according to Grand View Research.

For Hamburg and the wider region, the museum represents a significant cultural investment, positioning the city as a destination for innovative art experiences that merge technology with creativity in ways that would have been impossible just decades ago.