At the Serpentine Galleries, Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley’s Delusion lands less like an exhibition and more like a systems breach.
A new video game commission and multiplayer immersive experience from Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley that explores themes of polarisation, censorship and social connection. 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.
Brathwaite-Shirley is known for building interactive digital worlds that centre black trans lives while refusing the familiar politics of representation-as-explanation. The Delusion continues that trajectory, but with sharper teeth. Across immersive game-engine aesthetics, sound, and participatory structures, the exhibition stages a confrontation with how institutions, technologies, and audiences alike metabolise identity, trauma, and visibility.
Interactivity in contemporary art often flatters the viewer with a sense of agency while changing very little. Brathwaite-Shirley flips this script. Participation here is ethically charged: every choice implicates you in a system of power, inclusion, or exclusion. The exhibition’s logic borrows from video games and surveillance architectures, but it weaponises them against passive spectatorship. You are not invited to “experience” the work; you are drafted into it.
This is where The Delusion earns its title. The delusion is not digital immersion, nor identity politics, nor even the promise of radical art. The delusion is the belief that one can enter such a space untouched – that one’s position remains neutral simply because one is “just looking.” Brathwaite-Shirley exposes that fantasy with surgical precision.
Avatars flicker between vulnerability and defiance. Voices address the viewer directly, sometimes tender, sometimes accusatory. The aesthetics are deliberately abrasive: glitches, saturated colour, and distorted sound produce a sense of psychic overload. This is not spectacle for its own sake. It mirrors the conditions of living within systems that constantly demand legibility while denying safety.
Crucially, Brathwaite-Shirley resists the extractive logic often imposed on marginalised narratives. There is no neat pedagogical arc, no explanatory wall text that translates lived experience into institutional digestibility. Instead, the work insists on opacity, refusal, and fragmentation – strategies that feel politically urgent in a cultural moment obsessed with transparency, metrics, and moral signalling.
What makes The Delusion particularly resonant is its scepticism toward the contemporary art world itself. Museums and galleries increasingly position themselves as sites of ethical progress, yet remain entangled in the same surveillance, data extraction, and symbolic economies as the technologies they critique. Brathwaite-Shirley does not exempt the Serpentine from this tension. The exhibition feels acutely aware of its institutional container and quietly antagonistic towards it.
This antagonism is productive. Rather than offering catharsis, The Delusion leaves viewers unsettled, unsure whether they have failed a test or merely discovered that the test was rigged; It refuses closure, and in doing so, it aligns with a growing strand of contemporary practice that treats art not as moral instruction, but as a destabilising force: one that reveals how easily good intentions slide into complicity.
In an era saturated with immersive experiences, Brathwaite-Shirley’s work stands out for its refusal to entertain without consequence. The Delusion is not about imagining better futures in the abstract; it is about interrogating the systems – technological, cultural, institutional – that structure whose futures are considered expendable in the first place.
This is demanding work. It does not reward casual consumption or aesthetic tourism, and that is precisely its value. The Delusion reminds us that art, at its most necessary, “comforts the disturbed and disturbs the comfortable;” asking sharper questions, and leaving you alone with the tensions between the answers.
