Visitors will have to make difficult decisions in Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley’s exhibition The Delusion, which opens today at Serpentine North in London (until 18 January 2026). London-born Brathwaite-Shirley, a Berlin-based artist and video game designer, has created a series of multiplayer video games that invite “players to examine their own ethical, political and moral choices while considering broader societal structures and histories of marginalisation”, says an exhibition text.
For The Unifier game, players must place their hands on a table and work together to move a ball through maze-like structures while pondering issues such as “What should be censored?” The purpose of this communal exercise is to “rehumanise connection and enable honest exchange”, adds the exhibition text.
The installation is timely in the wake of geo-political ruptures in Western society, with populist parties on the rise across Europe and President Trump clamping down on diversity and equity initiatives at US museums.
Brathwaite-Shirley feels we are in a moment where the ability to speak freely is being curtailed. “It feels like we can’t have a discussion without risking something anymore,” Brathwaite-Shirley tells The Art Newspaper. “It feels instead like we come with a prepared opinion rather than trying to figure out what we actually think and that’s a problem.”
In another game, entitled The Validators, participants respond by shooting lamp-shaped guns at a screen while instructions flash up on a screen such as: “Raise your hand if you feel worried about censorship.” Brathwaite-Shirley says: “We have taken an arcade shooter and made it into a contemplative thinking game rather than a violent game. There are three levels—one level touches on censorship, another on dehumanisation and another on hope.” The work incorporates factual and fictional content drawn from the daily news cycle.
An installation view of The Validators
The exhibition, organised by the Serpentine’s technology arm (Serpentine Arts Technologies), highlights the 21st-century crossover between video games and the visual arts. “I’ve always seen games as art. I was looking at a game called Frontier: Elite II, made in 1989—I look at old games as pieces of art and look at them the same as someone might study a Rembrandt,” Brathwaite-Shirley says.
The video games were developed collaboratively with a team of artists, researchers, technologists and members of Brathwaite-Shirley’s Black trans and queer community, according to a statement. The exhibition, through some of the question posed by its games, builds on Brathwaite-Shirley's ongoing work archiving Black trans histories: in 2020, the artist founded the Black trans archive—a first-person game that functions as an archive, turning the idea of traditional repositories on their head.
