‘I’m done with spectacle’: Artist Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley on using video games to provoke complex self-interrogation
“Your soul may be dirty. Would you like to clean it?” This is what you see when you enter Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley’s game-based exhibition The Soul Station. Commissioned by LAS Art Foundation and hosted at Halle am Berghain in Berlin, the experience places visitors, or players, in a speculative universe, where the end goal isn’t to win but rather grapple with their inner biases within society. Questions like, “Have you ever lied intentionally?” or “Do you even like yourself?” force viewers to become active participants in the interactive space. The questions themselves aren’t the focus, instead functioning like prompts to reach inwards, and cleanse your soul.
The second chapter of a two-part exhibition, Are You Soulless, Too? begins with a cut scene narrating a backstory about a group of people that have been hunted down and killed until they’re saved by a community of people from a parallel universe. Off-screen, this corresponds to the audience members’ actions who, using multiple screens dispersed across the exhibition hall, can make the collective decision whether to save the character in the game before the time runs out.
Historically, Brathwaite-Shirley’s work has focused on the Black trans experience, using interactive games to tackle topics such as transphobia and racism, and while this is still a central theme across her most recent work, it could be said to shine a broader lens on all kinds of otherness. “Inside a lot of the games are these conversations around trying to hold onto parts of yourself while also having to hold on to these new set of rules society is giving you that you don't necessarily agree with,” she expands.
Aliens are also a recurring theme throughout Brathwaite-Shirley’s practice – “I really like using non-human forms, everyone looks like an alien,” she says. “I often use these alien figures because I feel that a lot of the time in art, queer, trans or bodies of colour are often put on display in order to get empathy, rather than there be an intrinsic empathy of just being a human.” In one game, for instance, the audience is required to shoot at the screen despite on-screen warnings that tell you otherwise, as aliens spill into the game and have no way of knowing who’s ‘good’ or ‘bad’. “You have to not have that information and still go forward and try to understand these people. There’s a lot of complex emotions that happen inside someone’s stomach and chest.”
“I like games because they make you have to take action. You have to literally take actions for them to progress. You have to do something for the game to do something back to you, and so it’s more of a relationship,” she elaborates. “You’re trying to work with the game. The game’s trying to work with your actions. You can do something wrong all the time. You don’t know what’s the right thing to do. The game doesn’t know what you want to see.”
The medium of video games requires active participation on the part of the viewer, which makes it easier to step into another’s perspective – LAS’ previous exhibition saw artist Lawrence Lek transform Berghain into a rehabilitation clinic for depressed cars, where viewers could inhabit multiple points of view around non-human intelligence. With Brathwaite-Shirley, the emphasis on collective action and self-reflection arrives at a time when it seems the world is more divided than ever, it leaves you thinking that we could very well take some of the compassion encouraged through their works, and bring it into the everyday. “I’m done with the spectacle,” she concludes. “[The games] should leave you with complex emotions: was that about war? Was it about censorship? What have I done? Have I been silent?”
Visit the gallery above for a closer look. Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley’s The Soul Station (commissioned by LAS Art Foundation and hosted at Halle am Berghain in Berlin) ran from July 12 – October 13, 2024.