The opening artwork in Serpentine North’s pioneering new exhibition is a blood-red stained-glass window. It represents a fictional apocalypse called the “Day of Division”, where hate-filled online comments come true and whole groups of people are decimated. Inside the gallery, through blackout curtains, a series of dark rooms contain bright, horror-coded multi-player installations in which participants are encouraged to explore their own views and discuss them with other visitors.
Extreme polarisation of opinion is one of the crucial problems of our time. Coupled with social fragmentation and online media, it is driving humanity towards a dangerously fractured world. This is the central issue designer Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley seeks to address in a startling new show, The Delusion. Part immersive installation, part retro-gaming experience, part visitor-fuelled improv, this is an ambitious, challenging and timely project.
“The Delusion is about having difficult conversations,” says Brathwaite-Shirley. “It’s a place to view yourself and a mirror to society.” Born in 1995, the artist now lives in Berlin and operates internationally. Brathwaite-Shirley uses and develops open-source gaming tech as well as animation, sound-recording, zine-writing and other artforms to record and explore life as a Black Trans person. Using interactive digital experiences to envision a future where marginalised voices are more powerful, the artist also mines the aesthetics of video game history to create retro visuals that are simultaneously fresh and nostalgic.
Along with Lydia Chan’s exhibition design and lighting by Rob Prouse, huge numbers of co-creators and contributors are credited with input at almost every stage of the process of making The Delusion, which involved four years of R&D. The exhibition began as a zine or small graphic novel by Brathwaite-Shirley called Below the Blue Line. The story imagines that, in the aftermath of “The Day of Division”, like-minded factions live together for safety and have no contact with anyone who disagrees with their version of the truth, a survival strategy called “Peace by Isolation”.
The rooms, containing different games, are partly configured as domestic interiors, although the overall effect is more like an amusement arcade. One game relies on players cooperating around a moveable dining table to channel an onscreen ball through a series of scenarios. In the next room, guns are disguised as lamps with tasselled shades and used to vote on statements and questions that appear onscreen. In the peripheral section, doors can be opened to admit (or closed to shut out) a variety of opinions drawn from recent news headlines, online and real-world forums.
This is not as grim and serious as it might sound. Symbols from various cultural and religious sources are mixed with distorted portraits and pictures of monsters. There is plenty of humour in the cartoon-like drawings, the lipstick-bright colour scheme and psychedelic décor, the fun, faux-homely touches and the satirical ad absurdum premise. At the same time, it certainly succeeds in making viewers uncomfortable through both content and delivery.
Even the Safe Room at the back of the exhibition, where visitors can relax on a giant curving red sofa, keeps up the show’s high levels of interrogation. “How will you be remembered if you died today?” asks a handwritten question on one lace-doily-covered cushion. “What’s a delusion you still hold onto?” says another. “What is something you feel guilty about?” “What’s something you learned the hard way?” These questions, from an early prototype of the game, are as thought-provoking as the rest of the show. Personal responsibility is a powerful thread here. “There was no origin. There was no epicentre. It was nowhere. Then it was everywhere,” reads an extract from the original graphic novel. The idea of the Overton Window, the spectrum that frames any publicly acceptable range of opinions, is a covert motif.
The Delusion is certainly more rewarding if you take part. The conversations it triggers with fellow visitors are the whole point. Refusing to engage with this aspect is, as one viewer puts it, like going to a conventional art exhibition and refusing to look at the actual paintings. Polarisation, censorship, the erosion of hard-won rights: all these vital themes and more are crammed into the four dim-lit spaces, bursting with a jumble of ideas and images. It’s hard to see how far the show will succeed in provoking meaningful discussions, but it’s certainly worth trying. It can be a bit confusing as an experience, especially perhaps for non-gamers, but it does attempt to reflect and affect, as Brathwaite-Shirley says, “the messy reality of what it truly means to live together”.
Runs until 18 January 2026
