Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley: The Soul Station

The Berlin techno club provides the perfect setting for a pioneering game-making artist whose works hold visitors responsible for their actions

Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley. Portrait. Courtesy the Artist.


Halle am Berghain, Berlin
12 July – 13 October 2024

by JOE LLOYD

Game over. The screen flashes an infernal red. It reads: “You have saved a single person. But erased 55 with your gaze. A single soul smiles at you.” To be fair to myself, I did take over the controls halfway through; and given that the next person who played erased 86 souls and “let them all die”, I am not too distraught at my record (the player after that was too busy taking Instagram snaps to initiate the next game). This is the end – or one ending – of You Can’t Hide Anything, the first part of the British artist Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley’s The Soul Station. Commissioned by LAS Art Foundation, it is an artwork in the form of a video game.

Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, You Can't Hide Anything, 2024. Commissioned by LAS Art Foundation. Courtesy the artist; LAS Art Foundation. © Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley.


Brathwaite-Shirley is a pioneer in an emerging medium. In 2012, New York’s Museum of Modern Art started collecting video games, causing minor controversy. Since then, the lines between games and art have become progressively blurred. In 2022, Hans Ulrich Obrist curated Worldbuilding at the Julia Stoschek Collection in Düsseldorf, an exhibition that combined artworks inspired by gaming with artworks presented in the form of games. Obrist says: “Video games are to the 21st century what movies were to the 20th century.” Like films, they were once the purview of specialised workers with access to specific technology. But advances have placed them in the artist’s arsenal. It is now easier than ever to create a game yourself.

Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, The Soul Station, 2024. Installation view at Halle am Berghain, Berlin. Commissioned by LAS Art Foundation. Courtesy the artist; LAS Art Foundation. Photo: Alwin Lay.

A DIY mentality has flourished. As well as creating work for exhibitions, Brathwaite-Shirley has self-released games to their website, drawing on the open access, free-to-all principles of the early internet. The Soul Station is their most visually advanced game yet. It forms the centrepiece of Brathwaite-Shirley’s exhibition at Halle am Berghain, a cavernous concrete space within Berlin’s queer techno club. A second instalment, Are You Soulless, Too? will follow from September.

The Soul Station is a first-person exploration game, visible on an eye-shaped screen. It is played within an amphitheatre, clothed in textiles featuring glitchy patterns and surrounded by head-shaped cushions. Inside, there is a central chair for the Leader, who controls the movement of the player character. All around there are tablets that spectators – dubbed the Audience – can use to interact with objects that the player encounters, as well as to vote on questions posed by characters. As the game starts, the audience are implored to shout out advice to the Leader: “Do not sit and do nothing.” (On my visit, the Audience was rather recalcitrant, perhaps fatigued by the late-July heat.)

Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, The Soul Station, 2024. Installation view at Halle am Berghain, Berlin. Commissioned by LAS Art Foundation. Courtesy the artist; LAS Art Foundation. Photo: Alwin Lay.

The game is set within a post-revolutionary parallel world, where an enslaved population has overthrown its colonial overlords. The player, who has been “up to no good”, is subject to a morality test in which they must locate and save six characters – there is a historian, a doctor, a preacher, a preparer – in a limited time. When they encounter these, the timer freezes and ominous monologues begin. Questions are posed to all present, for instance: “Do you think that certain bodies are more dangerous than others?”

The gameplay is simple. But the visual environment that Brathwaite-Shirley creates is not. Inspired by early PlayStation 2 graphics, it features a discombobulating combination of bulginess and flatness. Characters are assemblages of blocky shapes, like PlayStation 1-era role-playing-game (RPG) non-player characters. Brathwaite’s world is trippy and frazzled. It has psychedelic colours and eye-popping patterning. Some rooms feature strange lamprey-mouthed creatures, others display artworks from the fiction’s revolutionary struggle. It is easy to get lost within this beguiling dungeon, hunting out bits of lore.

Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, The Soul Station, 2024. Installation view at Halle am Berghain, Berlin. Commissioned by LAS Art Foundation. Courtesy the artist; LAS Art Foundation. Photo: Alwin Lay.

Brathwaite-Shirley is adept at capturing the bizarre tone of such games, freighted with pseudo-religious language and foreboding sentences that in real-life would be met with a clarification request. Words are important in this exhibition. The Soul Station is accompanied by text-based touchscreen games that intermingle English and German phrases with an encrypted language of symbols that can be gleaned through the exhibition. The world of the main game itself is awash with text. You can shoot “your gaze” to break down walls and explore further rooms; this appears to be a giant rolling ball with “your gaze” written on it. There is a wall of “redacted deadnames”. Messages appear throughout the world, often concerned with the idea of changing oneself: “Do you need to change?”; “I would stoop so low just to change.”

Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, You Can't Hide Anything, 2024. Commissioned by LAS Art Foundation. Courtesy the artist; LAS Art Foundation. © Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley.


It is an environment that is alluring yet hostile, littered with barbs for the unwary. Brathwaite-Shirley’s work often foregrounds their black and trans identity. “This,” reads a text at the exhibition’s threshold, “is a pro black pro trans pro fury pro nerd space.” The Soul Station’s unyielding terrain might reflect the difficulties that the artist, and those that share their identity, face in a world draped in prejudice. Other pieces are more explicit. In No Space for Redemption (2024), the player navigates an escalating series of situations as a trans person, whether dealing with obstructive security personnel at a passport gate or being chased down a street at night. It is a harrowing piece. Some of the multiple-choice prompts – “ATTACK WITHOUT WARNING: SLASH SLASH SLASH” – convey the impulse of a panicking mind.

Soul Station aside, Brathwaite-Shirley’s games here centre on this choose-your-own-adventure mechanism, which sometimes makes them seem less like playable games than episodic selections of videos. While some feature a point-and-click-style cursor, that only serves to allow you to choose answers. At their best, the game elements force you to actively engage with the works and become responsible for what happens within them. And they make one question one’s agency, both in the games themselves and in a wider world where freedom is often contingent on the systems we are trapped within.

Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, The Soul Station, 2024. Installation view at Halle am Berghain, Berlin. Commissioned by LAS Art Foundation. Courtesy the artist; LAS Art Foundation. Photo: Alwin Lay.

The playable elements here are relatively limited. Sometimes the two options are exactly the same. Pirating Blackness (2021), a nautical tour that retraces the route of the transatlantic slave trade with fantasy elements, features cut scene after cut scene, so that the sense of interactivity is sometimes lost. It features mythical beasts and strange characters, placing it within a similar RPG space to the soul station. Invasion Pride (2022), by contrast, uses footage and sounds from a smartphone camera as the basis for a mystery. “Black smoke” has appeared in the forest; most options are essentially “go ahead” or “hold back”. I find it difficult to go forward.

A conception of blackness, and black trans-ness, as a sort of unexplained natural disaster also occurs in Into The Storm (2022), a CG animated piece which tells the story of a mysterious black mass that appears in the ocean. Entering it allows the creation of “a new world for black trans” people. If you enter this void, the humanoid protagonists are transformed into Brathwaite-Shirley and their collaborators. This bold new domain might simply be a place where the artist and their peers can live without fear, without marginalisation. May that future come to pass.