It’s a quiet morning at London gallery Studio Voltaire and Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley is challenging me to a trial run of her latest artwork. It’s a horror-inspired video game in which players fight to overcome the problems that are holding them back, from fear of failure to addiction. It’s also the centrepiece of her first institutional solo show, which takes on the theme of transformation. I grapple with the game but, by my fourth round, I’m still no good; synthetic screams echo around the empty gallery. “It’s supposed to be super hard!” laughs Brathwaite-Shirley. “It’s all based on things that I’m trying to overcome or have overcome. It didn’t take one turn, it took many.”
The Rebirthing Room is the latest of Brathwaite-Shirley’s participatory works. The idea came to her after a conversation with a curator about the usefulness of art galleries. “We were talking about the ways we could use a space to do something more. Rather than just showing a piece, what can it do?” she says. “Then I thought: it would be amazing if you came to a gallery and left as a different person.”
The 29-year-old began making interactive art in 2020 after a misguided comment from a visitor left her questioning her work’s purpose. At the time, her portfolio consisted of videos and animations that documented the London burlesque scene she was involved with, as well as her Black transgender peers. Presented in what she describes as a “beautiful, retro-aesthetic” style, it created alternative realities for members of her community – an unconventional approach to archiving to remedy the blind spots in historical records. “Someone said to me: I really like your work because I can bathe in the visuals and ignore what you’re saying,” Brathwaite-Shirley recalls. “I was like: that’s the best feedback I’ve ever had in my life … because I cannot do that any more!”
From then on, she started incorporating choices for audience members to make in order to progress through the work. In 2022, she presented Get Home Safe, an arcade-style game inspired by her own experiences of walking around Berlin at night, where players are tasked with guiding the protagonist through dark streets safely. Meanwhile, last year’s browser-based I Can’t Follow You Anymore asks the audience to navigate a revolution and decide who will be saved or sacrificed. “In interactive work, you have to put effort in to see anything at all,” she says. “It’s the choices people make and the feeling they leave with that I’m fascinated with. I think that’s when the real artwork begins to happen.”
Keen to prioritise content over aesthetics, Brathwaite-Shirley’s new work draws on the rudimentary pre-rendered graphics of early computer games. It’s deliberately lo-fi, built from 2D animations, iPad drawings and outdated software, with a VHS-style finish. The grass in the on-screen forest is made from edited photographs of her hands, while the sounds are developed from recordings of herself screaming into her phone – an extension of her archival project. “I never want to get to this super high-glossy thing,” she says. “I like to make people’s brains work a little bit more.”
Complete with disorienting sound effects and low lighting, the Rebirthing Room is a fully immersive experience. Surrounding the screens and the handbuilt, audience-operated controller are huge trees draped in fabric and rows of real corn – a reference to the horror movies she grew up watching.
“The thing I like about horror is that it makes you want to go through experiences and feelings that you would never want to on a typical day,” she says. “If the film’s really good, something about it keeps you there. It’s a really nice balance of it being super scary but intriguing enough to keep you with it.”
Beyond being a nifty device to “trick” viewers into reckoning with their own values and beliefs, Brathwaite-Shirley’s digital universes filled with demons, villains and gore feel appropriate for the current climate. As well as the hostility from outsider groups, it’s also important to highlight all the “messy nuances” that exist within one’s own, she says: “It feels like we’re in such a censored time, [where] even speaking about a view that your particular political group agrees with feels dangerous because it feels like you have to say it in the way that they want to hear it. And so for me, presenting a utopia in the settings we’re currently in is very, very much useless.”
Challenging the audience is something she wants to see more of in the art world, which she feels too often favours pleasant, Instagram-friendly experiences. It’s not her aim to make people enjoy her work; she finds a more visceral, emotional reaction more interesting. She tells me that if she leaves a show with only compliments, she feels that her work has done nothing.
She’s curious about how the audience will respond to the Rebirthing Room. Will they play until they succeed? Or will they, like me, give up? Only time will tell. “I’m just excited to see how I can push it further next time,” she says.
• Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley: The Rebirthing Room is at Studio Voltaire, London, until 28 April 2024
