Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley: THE DELUSION

30 Sep 2025-18 Jan 2026

Overview

A new video game commission and multiplayer immersive experience run on game engines from Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley that explores themes of polarisation, censorship and social connection.

“Let’s have the difficult conversations” – Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley

Enter a fractured future – a new era called ‘Peace by Isolation’.

THE DELUSION combines satire and absurd humour with cooperative gaming and participatory theatre to explore the real-world impacts of societal division. Artist and game designer Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley invites visitors into a post-apocalyptic world shaped by a single catastrophic event—the Day of Division. In this imagined future, society has broken into closed, dogmatic factions, each clinging to its own version of truth, community, and survival. Conceived as a “live community play” and meeting space, the project aims to rehumanise debates and provide a space for players to pause, discuss and reconnect.

Commissioned and produced by Serpentine Arts Technologies, this is Brathwaite-Shirley’s most ambitious work to date — featuring a new series of video games and works developed collaboratively over the course of the past year with a team of artists, researchers, technologists and members of Danielle’s Black Trans and Queer community.

Visitors will be welcomed into an immersive installation designed in collaboration with Lydia Chan that blends the artists’ personal history, religious and spiritual symbols and elements of horror.

THE DELUSION builds on Brathwaite-Shirley’s urgent and ongoing work archiving Black Trans histories through game environments. Drawing on both advanced and ‘obsolete’ technologies—including the community-built open-source game engine UPGBE — the project furthers exploration into the creative and civic potential of video games.

Set in Hyde Park, home of the historic Speaker’s Corner, one of the last such remaining destinations for public speaking and debate in the UK, the project centres the role of the “audience as medium”, asking how we relate, respond, and resist when faced with collapsing systems and distorted realities.