Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley’s Haunting Alongside Our Shadows will be on display at QUAD from September 2021. Danielle’s work is based in historical happening’s, creating video-game inspired artworks that form part of her Black Trans archive to, as the artist states, “record the lives of Black Trans People in the present to imagine our existence in the past through immersive storytelling.”

For her exhibition at QUAD she presents an entirely new body of ambitious, digital and interactive artworks. Working alongside her community of Black Trans Femmes, she has created animated ghostly imaginings of her non-gendered ancestors – whose existence is recorded and presented in glyphs, song and motion-captured dancing bodies that will appear as phantom-like figures across the gallery.

The large-screen work Pirating Blackness (BlackTransSea.com) like most works in the exhibition is an immersive video game. It encompasses Critical Fabulation – a term that references a writing methodology that combines historical and archival research with critical theory and fictional narrative. It is a work that examines an alternative past where the ocean itself did not support the journey towards colonisation made across its surface.

Mixing horror with futuristic fiction, visitors will be guided through this multisensory exhibition and required to think of how their own stories and ancestral histories are interlinked with the histories of Black Trans people. The entire gallery space will react depending on where the viewer is and what they do. Unable to passively consume the art, the visitor instead must put in work to access the content in each artwork.

Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley comments:

“The identity of the gallery visitor controls how this exhibition will manifest around YOU – creating a literal haunting of the shadow that your own history and those your ancestors have cast.
YOU ARE ENTERING A BLACK TRANS SPACE 

YOU’RE HISTORY AND IDENTITY WILL ENTER THIS SPACE WITH YOU 

AND DETERMINE WHAT YOU HAVE ACCESS TO AND WHAT YOU DON’T.

TREAD WITH CARE.

THIS SPACE MAY NOT BE FOR YOU”

Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley Biography

Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley is an artist working predominantly in animation, sound, performance and Video Games to communicate the experiences of being a Black Trans person. Their practice focuses on recording the lives of Black Trans people, intertwining lived experience with fiction to imaginatively retell Trans stories. Spurred on by a desire to record of “History of Trans people both living and past” their work can often be seen as a Trans archive where Black Trans people are stored for the future.

Throughout history, Black queer and Trans people have been erased from the archives. Because of this it is necessary not only to archive our existence, but also the many creative narratives we have used and continue to use to share our experiences. Danielle’s work has been shown in Science Gallery, MU, Barbican, Tate, Les Urbains as well as being part of the BBZ Alternative Graduate Show at the Copeland Gallery. An online component of their work can often be found at: www.daniellebrathwaiteshirley.com