Espai 13

Exhibition program

We will keep each other company when it grows dark

Artist

Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley

Dates

19/07/2024 — 20/10/2024

Place

Espai 13

Curated by

Irina Mutt

In many of her projects, Brathwaite-Shirley starts from her interest in creating archives to document and remember Black and trans lives. These archives, fictions or memories are often activated and formalised as video games, while also featuring other formats, such as installations, texts and performance.

Rather than organising information or creating taxonomies, the archives created by the artist are meant to catch our attention and to confront us. In accessing them we are led to reformulate questions about who we are, what intentions we have or what we value. In her projects we are asked to interpret any situation that might arise and make decisions based on how we position ourselves when faced with what emerges from the stories that all archives tell.

The work of Brathwaite-Shirley does not announce or specify what we should do or how we should think. Rather, it reflects our image and gives it back to us, leaving us space so we can be the ones to make decisions and deal with the consequences. The artist does not deploy a pedagogy intended to offer responses or to awaken empathy. What is offered instead is a questioning of who we are and what we are capable of doing.

Using video games as tools to explain interactive stories, No Comment deals with questions of how narratives about the violence experienced by others are received and shared. What do we need to feel empathy? Which bodies do we claim justice for, and which bodies are forgotten? These are some of the questions we are asked to reformulate when moving through the narrative proposed by Brathwaite-Shirley.