“America has been the only place where some text in my work was censored,” says Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley. A video game that the 29-year-old British artist had made about walking home alone at night had been on view in the US. Accompanying wall text featured the phrase “your state has failed you”. But the gallery “said that using the word ‘state’ was too political”.
The gallery also restricted children from accessing the piece. “Because I was trans, parents had to opt in to allow the kids to see my work,” she says. “It wasn’t a violent game. It wasn’t about trans-ness as a whole — that wasn’t the main focus. It [was] about getting home safe. But America was the only place where kids weren’t allowed in.”
Experiences like this underpin the artist’s video installations and immersive games — which have been shown at MoMA, Berlin’s Berghain and Tate Modern — about preserving the people omitted from history, with a focus on Black trans lives. Over a video call, Brathwaite-Shirley lists eclectic influences that range from artists such as Sondra Perry and Travis Alabanza to the video game studio Puppet Combo and Metal Gear Solid designer Hideo Kojima. Haunted PS1, a community of developers who create low-res horror games, is “an extreme inspiration”.
Her games may be visual labyrinths full of eerily striking visual references. But they are more than that. Take Black Trans Archive (2020), in which the player is first questioned about their identity — whether they are “Black and trans”, “trans” or “cis” — determining their path through the virtual space.
The work will be on view at Frieze New York in a solo booth presented by London’s Public Gallery, alongside other games and drawings. “We’re showing BlackTransSea (2021),” says Brathwaite-Shirley. “You go on the journey of your ancestors — whether they were taken across the ocean, or they travel to take other people across the ocean. If your ancestors are people that carry people across the ocean, that ship can never make it to its destination. It always sinks.”
Then there’s the most intense game the artist has ever made — No space for redemption (2024). It’s about war, sport, the police, border security, love and interrogating family members. “It’s also about people online who cause trauma to other people and use that trauma as content for themselves.” Each section is inspired by conversations, dreams and experiences Brathwaite-Shirley has had. “This particular piece is very diaristic.”
The artist will not be travelling to the US, where President Trump’s executive orders have targeted trans people’s rights. “I’m sad I’m not going,” Brathwaite-Shirley says. “It’s too scary to travel.”
The idea behind each artwork typically begins with a conversation. “My job is to just listen and collect snippets of what they’re saying. Images that are important to them or are of them. Once I have everything, we use those images to craft the foundation of the environment,” says Brathwaite-Shirley. “We” is a group of Black trans coders and developers. Using software such as Blender and Gimp, they can create anything from a figure to a landscape to an object within 15 minutes. However, there’s a rule — once it’s been created, it can’t be deleted. No matter if it’s terrible, or spelled incorrectly, it all must go into the piece.
“Initially, when I started, I wanted the work to be an archive,” the artist explains. “I would start by taking photos of Black trans people and putting them in the game. [But] I found that when I would make something and delete it, I felt like I was also curating what I thought was appropriate to archive about the person. I was almost doing some of the similar erasure that I think archives do. This way, even if you don’t see it, it’s underneath. It’s there in some way.”
Brathwaite-Shirley was born in 1995 and raised in Streatham, south London. “My grandma was a Seventh-Day Adventist, so we’d go to a Seventh-Day Adventist church. A very happy-clappy, ‘I’m possessed on the weekend’ church,” the artist laughs. Growing up, Brathwaite-Shirley became increasingly fascinated with video games. “I would dream in Doom graphics, but imagine my family in there.” A timid and artsy child, interested in how things were constructed, Brathwaite-Shirley was “a big nerd at heart”.
After studying at the Slade School of Fine Art in London, Berlin beckoned. “I think the pace of life in London is really fast. In Berlin, I live by a lake very far out of the city and it lets me just spend all this time thinking.”
Her early works were long animations with complex storylines. One of them was called Blackzilla (2018). It was about an AI that comes back to Earth after a long time away and decides to make an atmosphere that is only breathable for Black trans people. “[It was] entertaining, but for messaging, ineffective.”
In recent works, the artist says, “I want to activate people’s brains and allow them to have conversations with people that they don’t like. With people that they don’t care about. With people that they think they have nothing in common with.”
Brathwaite-Shirley doesn’t expect the audience to arrive with fully formed ideas but rather to be open to new thoughts. “We’ve lost, especially in London, a lot of community centres. It feels very difficult to go to a physical space where you can muddle through a topic you don’t fully understand. It feels like you must be an expert in order to talk about the topic. And if you don’t, the consequences can be quite dire.”
A participatory performance at Tate Modern last year “ended up as this [big] conversation that wouldn’t stop. We went well over time. People just talked and talked and talked and talked.” It was proof, the artist concluded, of the importance of offline encounters.
For an exhibition at the Serpentine in the autumn, the artist is creating a work in which the only function is to encourage participants to talk to each other. “The game controls all the lights in space. It controls the environment as well as conversation topics. It’s a game that is not just purely linked to playing [but] gets you to look away from the screen and into someone’s eyes.”
The heart of Brathwaite-Shirley’s art lies in what happens to the player — especially once the game ends. It’s “what you leave with, rather than what you’re seeing,” the artist says. “I wouldn’t want someone to leave saying that the artwork is beautiful, even if it is. I would much rather them say ‘I felt’ or ‘I didn’t like’ or ‘I have to think about X’.”
May 7-11, frieze.com
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