Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley (b.1995, London) archives Black Trans experiences through animation, sound, performance, and video games. The Berlin and London-based artist’s work confronts the historical erasure and neglect of Black Trans lives, creating spaces and narratives that center their bodies, stories, and futures.

Trans & Conditions, her major multimedia commission for CIRCA, unfolds across digital, physical, and public platforms, the project confronts the systems that govern how trans lives are recognised, controlled, and remembered — offering space for both discomfort and solidarity.

At the heart of the commission is https://transandconditions.com, an interactive platform guiding the public through a series of reflective prompts — including “WHAT DO YOU WANT TO SAY TO THE TRANS PEOPLE WHO ARE SCARED RIGHT NOW?” — culminating in the creation of a public letter. These letters are archived as collective expressions of care, witness, and shared voice.

Created in response to the UK Supreme Court’s recent redefinition of “woman” under the Equality Act, the work uses digital space to pose urgent questions: Who gets to speak? Who is remembered? And under what conditions are trans lives permitted to exist?

To accompany the commission, CIRCA presents a series of four limited-edition screen prints by Brathwaite-Shirley — each a powerful declaration of trans autonomy, urgency, and resistance. 20% of proceeds from each print will be donated to the Trans Legal Clinic, a community-led initiative providing vital legal support and advocacy for trans people in the UK.

Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley (b. 1995, London) is a Berlin- and London-based artist whose practice traverses video game design, performance, animation, and archival activism. Grounded in the lived experiences of Black trans people, their work constructs immersive digital worlds that challenge the boundaries between player and subject, archive and memory, witness and participant. Through speculative storytelling and radical interactivity, Brathwaite-Shirley reimagines the politics of visibility, care, and resistance.

Central to their work is the creation of interactive narratives that confront audiences with the ethics of engagement. In SHE KEEPS ME DAMN ALIVE (2021), players are forced to navigate a lightgun shooter in which moral clarity is deliberately destabilized. “I want to activate people’s brains,” Brathwaite-Shirley has said, “and allow them to have conversations with people that they don’t like. With people that they don’t care about. With people that they think they have nothing in common with.” Their installations are never passive—each game demands complicity, empathy, and reckoning.

A formative moment in Brathwaite-Shirley’s trajectory came with the discovery of an 1836 poster of Mary Jones, a Black trans woman reduced to a cruel caricature and labeled the “Man Monster.” This erasure of Black trans histories catalysed the creation of Black Trans Archive (2020), a digital platform built through community collaboration, designed to preserve and honour the lives of Black trans people in the face of systemic neglect.

Recent projects have expanded the scope and scale of their work. THE SOUL STATION (2024), exhibited at Berlin’s Berghain, invited players into a post-revolutionary multiplayer world in YOU CAN’T HIDE ANYTHING, where progress depended on collective strategy and trust. Across their practice, Brathwaite-Shirley consistently turns the screen into a site of encounter—forcing players to not only witness but to choose, fail, and try again.

Their work has been shown internationally, including at MoMA, Tate Modern, the Serpentine, and most recently in solo exhibitions at Fundació Joan Miró, Studio Voltaire, and LAS. Despite growing critical acclaim, Brathwaite-Shirley’s unapologetically trans and Black-centered narratives have also faced censorship, particularly in the U.S., where institutions have pulled or restricted access to their work.

Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley’s practice is both archive and insurgency—unfolding spaces where the stories of those too often left out of history are not only preserved, but made powerfully, unavoidably present.