Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley invites us into he delusion, an expansive installation at London’s Serpentine North gallery.

Her most ambitious project to date, the show manifests as a multiplayer video game commission fusing satire, absurdist humour and cooperative play to ask urgent questions about division, censorship and what it means to (re)connect.

Brathwaite-Shirley’s practice has always been about hacking the systems that define how stories are told — game engines, archives, technologies — and queering them into living records. Here, the audience inhabits a space designed as a community play where pauses, debates, and moments of solidarity become central to the artwork itself.

Drawing from her Black Trans and Queer community, the project layers advanced technologies with deliberately “obsolete” aesthetics like 2D sprite animation spliced with UPBGE, the open-source Blender engine. The effect is retro and radical, reminding us that futures can be rewritten from outdated remnants of the past.

If video games are often accused of fostering isolation, THE DELUSION flips the script: making play a site of connection, care and collective imagination.

THE DELUSION (30 September 2025 – 18 January 2026)

Serpentine North