No space for redemption

The Halle am Berghain is housed in a building that is also home to Berlin’s legendary nightclub – a place shrouded in intrigue, not least on account of its so-called ‘dark rooms’. It is an apt setting for this solo exhibition by Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley (b.1995), which is intended to guide the visitor into the darkest reaches of the self. ‘THIS SPACE WILL SHOW YOU YOUR SOUL’ is written on the lobby’s wall, with the warning, ‘YOU MAY NOT LIKE WHAT YOU SEE’. The idea is that no one is perfect, something of a platitude and yet one which, in the accusatory culture of today, people could take more seriously.

Brathwaite-Shirley’s exhibition THE SOUL STATION, commissioned by LAS Art Foundation, includes a new, interactive installation, which is staged in two consecutive episodes, and a survey of the artist’s video game works from 2021 to 2024.¹ Upon arrival, visitors receive a unique code to access various ‘Soul Stations’ FIG.1, several of which are shown in the cathedral-like, impressively derelict room upstairs FIG.2. These vertical touchscreens share the dimensions of illuminated advertising boards; they mostly consist of red text on a black background – hellish hues suggestive of godly judgment. Once the player has plugged in their code, the text announces that their soul is being ‘scanned’, before ordering them to embark on a journey of self-reckoning via a series of hypertexts. The screen flashes up such phrases as ‘WHEN WAS THE LAST TIME YOU WERE ASHAMED?’, ‘WHAT MEMORY DO YOU REGRET THE MOST?’ or, more simply, ‘DO YOU THINK YOU ARE A GOOD PERSON?’.

It is, of course, nigh-on impossible to unlock repressed transgressions on demand; it is not, as these questions seem to indicate, as simple as declaring goods at customs. It takes time and care, not least because shame is often attached to trauma, as felt in Rory Pilgrim’s painfully empathic work involving men imprisoned at HMP Portland, for instance.² It can also be triggered, but this is rarely an explicit instruction to cough up one’s contrition on the spot. Brathwaite-Shirley’s direct, albeit kitsch, mode of address recalls the kind of interpellation that the psychoanalyst and racial theorist Frantz Fanon recognised as invalidating subjectivity.³ Such externally imposed, mechanically performed ‘inner work’ is unlikely to succeed.

Throughout the exhibition, a moral reckoning is there in tone, but this does not always translate to one’s actual interaction with the work. The first chapter of the newly commissioned video game installation, YOU CAN’T HIDE ANYTHING FIG.3 consists of an amphitheatre overlooking a seat with a gaming wheel, angled up towards a circular, portal-like screen. It is played using a voting system, in which one person takes control of the driving seat, and others offer directions based on information only accessible on the tablets stationed beside them. The main player becomes the ‘leader’, whose screen presence rushes around a psychedelically lit building on a mission to ‘save’ certain trapped characters. Despite the interactive nature of the work, one has little agency as to the outcome. It is difficult to acclimatise to the wildly maximalist, multichromatic virtual space FIG.4, which is replete with flashing text, West African-inspired masks, holographic cascades of colour and spinning corona-esque balls. At the end, the players are given the result of their collective effort, which for the present reviewer was: ‘YOU SAVED 0/6 BUT ERASED 63 WITH YOUR GAZE’. Could a greater sense of cohesion have yielded a better result, or a less obliterating gaze? Are such questions being asked by the players or audience members in the gallery?

The trauma of having one’s interior self prevailed on is performed quite explicitly in Brathwaite-Shirley’s hypertext fiction NO SPACE FOR REDEMPTION FIG.5. The title itself could refer to the feeling of suffocation induced by the imposition of regulatory forces on one’s inner self. At one point, the player must guide a mother and child through an airport; the words of the title are spoken by a passport control officer, a nightmarish, shadowy figure behind steamed-up glass. The music is shrill, its tempo akin to hyperventilation. The narrative text explains that the mother’s ‘past life haunts her from the passport’, and an inverted cascade of passports floods the screen. Indeed, passports can reduce individuals to data that inadequately or incorrectly represents their identity, especially for those who, like Brathwaite-Shirley, are trans. Racial identity can also exacerbate matters, considering the biases of border controls in many countries. It is curious that while one can empathise with the Black trans mother in this game, the show’s overall mode of address is that of the passport control officer.

All of the games in this exhibition deploy barriers of hypertextual multiple choice as a means of holding the player to account. For example, at one point in NO SPACE FOR REDEMPTION, the player must decide whether to accuse the passport control officer of racism or to plead with them, among other options. Yet, as the narrative jumps from crisis to crisis without allowing space for an affective bond to form between player and character, the central motivation behind each choice is surely just as – if not more – likely to stem from curiosity than moral judgement. The premise of PIRATING BLACKNESS FIG.6 is the transatlantic slave trade; at the start, the player must declare whether they descend from ‘those that were carried accross the sea’ [sic] or ‘colonisers’. The opportunity to offload whatever ancestral debt one might carry at the click of a button inflects the grave subject-matter with disconcerting lightness. Furthermore, the exclusion of those who do not fit into this binary – for instance, colonised people who have not been subjected to maritime trafficking – is in danger of reducing the hypertext to arbitrary roleplay.

Something nearing a solution to all this is found in INVASION PRIDE FIG.7, the most convincing work in the show, not least due to the opacity of its glitchy, dreamy poetics. The game consists of black-and-white photographs and videos captured on a smartphone, maintaining a vertical format. Some of this technical familiarity is palpable on the monitor, preparing the player to be caught off-guard, while the glitches seem to probe the unconscious. When the player opts to speak to a mysterious, faceless person sitting in the bright sun, this opens a rabbit hole of symbolic scenarios: a dark forest, an abandoned building, the ocean. At one recurring juncture, a figure sashays out of the surf towards the camera, which then switches into a stop-start, forward-rewind shot of someone from behind, treading towards the beach. The player is asked if they ‘were only looking at their body’ or if they would like ‘to follow their smoke’ FIG.8. This reviewer paused before choosing the latter, which led to a Dantean forest path.

It is telling that the opening wall text is more a pastiche of a trigger warning than a real one. At times, Brathwaite-Shirley’s godlike delivery renders their work empty of affect, curtailing vulnerability in its audience and thus the possibility of any soulful connection. It may be compared to the psychosexual videogame Clickolding (2024), published online by Strange Scaffold, which causes the player to question their own compulsion to do little more than click a tally counter at the command of a masked man, who is clearly ‘getting off on this’, as the critic Lewis Gordon put it.⁴ The key difference is that, in Clickolding, the player is inclined to reflect of their own accord on something they are undeniably doing, whereas more often than not in this exhibition, the work of introspection is purportedly imposed from without.