In Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley’s Provocative Video Games, the Audience Is the Art

Brathwaite-Shirley wants to get audiences talking, she said. Many of her video game works prompt gallery visitors to confess things—fears, anxieties, mistakes—out loud. She asks a lot of viewers, pushing (some might say provoking) them to excavate shameful feelings. It’s through these admissions that we get to the “difficult conversations” that surround hot-button topics today: “dehumanization, war crimes, God, censorship, fascism, gender, the changing political landscape,” she listed, speaking about the new show’s themes.

“Today, it feels like there’s no place to have a conversation to figure out what you think,” the artist said in a walkthrough at the Serpentine. “I’m just trying to build a space that lets you have those hard conversations, even if what you’re saying I may not agree with.” This show, like many of her exhibitions, begins with a wallpaper text work, TERMS AND CONDITIONS (2025), that sets out the unusual expectations of her work.

The instructions, printed in retro 8-bit font, tell visitors to “speak, listen, and respond.” They end on a note of reassurance: “You are not being recorded.” Here, it explains, is a place to discuss the implications of your beliefs with no repercussions.

Across Brathwaite-Shirley’s career, she’s made a habit of asking taboo questions. The game Blacktranssea (2021), for instance, asks “who were your ancestors?” Players must self-identify either as colonizers or “those that were carried across the sea.” And in a 2024 performance—part video art, part quasi-religious ritual—at the Tate Modern, Brathwaite-Shirley asked the audience to identify their political beliefs to determine where the performance would go as she instructed and sang from the front of the group. It’s all part of her intention to create experiences with her art: “The audience is my medium,” the artist said in our interview.

Much of Brathwaite-Shirley’s early career revolved around performance. When she graduated from the Slade School of Fine Art in London in 2019, she had already presented solo performances at venues such as London’s Raven Row and the Barbican. Some of these early shows featured the artist singing odes to Black trans life, accompanied by projections of her trademark digital animations.

Yet she’s always been hooked on games, a love that took root when, as a child, she picked up her dad’s floppy disks. At first, she had no inkling that they were playable applications. She read their illustrated, story-filled manuals over and over again, until she wound up dreaming in their 8-bit graphics.

Those low-res visuals influence the artist to this day. Across all of her work, Brathwaite-Shirley is drawn to a DIY aesthetic (she calls it “crispy”). “Everything looks like someone’s hand has done it,” she said. Case in point: She made all of the games at the Serpentine from scratch using an open-source software not intended for video games. And rather than working with professionals, she chose people she has personal connections to as voice actors.

Friends in the Black trans community play a key role in Brathwaite-Shirley’s practice. “I just feel like that community has got me through everything,” she said. She honors them in works like Black Trans Archive (2020–23), a sprawling, interactive web-based collage that documents the eradication of Black trans voices throughout history. Rather than presenting dry biographies, the website takes visitors on an eccentric, somber journey through trans experiences, leading them to digital locales such as “Dead name burial site,” “Trans temple,” or “Cis city.” More recent work responds to the U.K. Supreme Court ruling on the legal definition of gender: “Basically, that trans women aren’t women,” as Brathwaite-Shirley put it. That work, Trans and conditions (2025), consists of a website that asks visitors to create letters sharing their support for trans people.

While much of Brathwaite-Shirley’s practice is informed by the tenor of contemporary social debate and her politicized experience as a Black trans woman, her practice also invokes a more intimate personal history. The exhibition space at Serpentine, for instance, is based on the layout of her grandmother’s house and filled with domestic items like rugs and ornate chairs.

On the walls, meanwhile, are horrifyingly reimagined family photos: WATCHERS (2025), a group of digital portraits based on people in her community who have influenced her. Collaging photographs with pixelated text, the works turn these meaningful personalities into monsters, a technique that recurs across her practice.

This habit of “monster-fying everyone,” she said, was a response to a horrific event she experienced: “someone telling me on the street that I should be shot for being trans,” she said, matter-of-factly, seemingly unfazed by the violence she described. “I was trying to see if I could find some power in this idea of being seen as a monster or a demon.”

The artist takes a similar approach in ink drawings from the series “REACTIONARY WORKS”: intensely dark, personal responses to current events, where everyone is depicted as a monster. These rapacious, neckless beasts are annotated with shocking opinions, confrontational questions, and howls of sorrow. “I pretend to care if it makes me look good,” reads a speech bubble coming out of one six-eyed, grimacing mutant. These drawings evoke the depths of raw depression and anger at a hostile world, referencing porn, suicide, censorship, and war. “It’s basically my diary,” said Brathwaite-Shirley.

But the audience is still the artist’s primary medium—so she’s invited visitors to make diary entries of their own. Her favorite part of the show is an area that is labeled on the exhibition plan as “safe room.” Here, viewers can sit and flick through zines, critical texts, and other works that informed Brathwaite-Shirley’s practice. There are also empty sketchbooks which the audience is invited to fill with their immediate thoughts and drawings.

Brathwaite-Shirley was shocked when a Serpentine staff member mentioned to us that they’ve been filling up around a book a day since the show opened. A flick through a few pages revealed surreal scribbles on some and dark confessions about the state of the world on others. Just as Brathwaite-Shirley had been hoping, visitors were opening up—and with their openness, perhaps, bringing a new attitude to the world outside.