Named one of Phaidon's 100 Future Art Superstars in 2022, Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley is a contemporary artist working across video games, animation, sound, and performance. Intertwining lived experience with futuristic fiction, Brathwaite-Shirley imaginatively retells trans stories, prompted by her desire to record the history particularly of Black trans people, both living and past.
Read MoreBrathwaite-Shirley graduated from the Slade School of Fine Art in London in 2019. The artist lives and works in London.
Brathwaite-Shirley's practice is often interpreted as an archive, where the stories of Black trans people are stored for the future. The artist's archival approach illuminates these stories without needlessly centring the trauma and violence that often accompanies the experiences of Black trans people, providing multiple points of access to emerging narrative themes.
Using game design and technologies like CGI, Braithwaite-Shirley intentionally employs a retro, low-fi aesthetic in her work, recalling classic video games and the text-based adventure games that emerged in the 1970s. The artist's highly stylised works are populated by evocative, semi-abstract avatars with auto-tuned voices that float through dark, liquid landscapes, resisting the reduction of Black trans lives into spectacle or fetish. Interactivity plays a major role in Braithwaite-Shirley's work, with the viewer becoming inextricably implicated in the way that each work progresses through the choices they make.
Built in collaboration with Black trans coders and developers, Brathwaite-Shirley's breakout work We are Here Because of Those That Are Not (also known as The Black Trans Archive) takes the form of an interactive game, allowing viewers to participate in real time.
Although everyone is welcome to engage with the artwork, users are directed through multiple experiences that differ depending on the viewer's identity. The low-resolution aesthetics of the archive enhance Brathwaite-Shirley's practice, making her digital art highly adaptable and enabling it to be supported by a variety of internet browsers, thereby increasing public access.
She Keeps Me Damn Alive is a digital game that takes We are Here Because of Those That Are Not/The Black Trans Archive as its starting point. Tasking participants with protecting Black trans lives against a monster feeding on marginalised groups, She Keeps Me Damn Alive is an exploration of responsibility, choice, and consequence through an immersive point-and-shoot interface.
The pro-Black, pro-trans game asks visitors to eliminate enemies across three low-poly, technicolour landscapes, all the while disrupting the flippant use of arms in gaming by applying heavy consideration to the outcomes of a misfire, repeatedly asking players how 'powerful' or 'excited' they feel to be wielding a weapon. The gun itself—a custom 3D-moulded, bubblegum-pink weapon with a brain-like protuberance and an ill-fitting grip—suggests an alternative history of what arcade games could have been and questions the efficacy of using guns to prevent harm.
Brathwaite-Shirley was named one of Phaidon's 100 Future Art Superstars in the book Prime: Art's Next Generation (2022). She was also selected as one of Apollo Magazine's 40 Under 40 in Art and Technology for 2021.
Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley has been the subject of both solo and group exhibitions. Selected solo exhibitions include GET HOME SAFE, David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles (2022); She Keeps Me Damn Alive, Arebyte Gallery, London (2021); We are Here Because of Those That Are Not, Science Gallery, London (2020); and Re$$urection Lands, Les Urbaines, Lausanne (2019).
Group exhibitions include Difference Machines, Albright Knox Gallery, New York (2021); Peer to Peer: UK/HK, various galleries/organisations and online, U.K. and Hong Kong (2020); and Transpose: The Future, Barbican, London (2018).
Brathwaite-Shirley's website can be found here and her Instagram can be found here.
Fay Janet Jackson | Ocula | 2022
