Wednesday 18 March 2026 5:00pm
The Classroom, Faculty of Architecture and History of Art
About
Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley (Berlin and London) in conversation with Dr Kareem Estefan (University of Cambridge)
About the talk:
How can an artwork be created that not only seeks to archive an audience through the process of making it, but requires audience participation for that same artwork to be complete? Through this interactive presentation audience members will experience what it means to be the medium of an artwork, how this is designed and how artwork can exist within the actions (and inactions) of an audience.
Following the presentation, Brathwaite-Shirley will be in conversation with Dr Kareem Estefan, exploring the artist’s critical engagement with archival and biographical conventions.
Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley (b. 1995, London) lives and works between Berlin and London. Working predominantly in animation, sound, performance and video game development, and with a background in DIY print media and activism, the artist’s practice focuses on intertwining lived experience with fiction to imaginatively retell and archive the stories of Black Trans people. Danielle utilises interactive technologies to create participatory spaces that challenge traditional narratives and encourage active engagement. Projects often take the form of immersive video games, where players navigate choices that confront their assumptions and biases, fostering deeper conversations about identity, privilege, and systemic oppression. Danielle’s work is both ‘archive and insurgency’, a catalyst for dialogue, inviting audiences to reflect on their roles within broader societal structures. Danielle has presented recent solo exhibitions at institutions such as Serpentine Galleries, London (2025); LAS Foundation, Halle am Berghain, Berlin (2024); Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona (2024); Studio Voltaire, London (2024); Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève (2024); SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah (2023); Villa Arson, Nice (2023); HAU Hebbel am Ufer, Berlin (2023); FACT, Liverpool (2022); Project Arts Centre, Dublin (2022); Skänes konstförening, Malmö (2022); Arebyte Gallery, London (2021). She was a resident artist at Wysing Arts Centre in 2021.
Dr Kareem Estefan is an Assistant Professor of Film and Screen Studies at the University of Cambridge, whose research centres on Arab cinema, documentary and experimental moving-image practices, and engagements with colonialism and decolonisation in film and contemporary art. His writing on contemporary visual culture has appeared in both scholarly and general-audience publications, including 4 Columns, Feminist Media Histories, Film Comment, Frieze, Journal of Visual Culture, The New Inquiry, Screen, Third Text, and World Records. He is also co-editor of Assuming Boycott: Resistance, Agency, and Cultural Production (OR Books, 2017). Currently, Dr Estefan is working on a book on Palestinian moving-image art, titled Portals to Palestine, positing a model of bearing witness as a decolonial process of worldmaking in which artists refract the unjust conditions of the present and reconstruct unrealised political potential from the past to animate visions of emergent rights and resurgent communities. He received a PhD in Modern Culture and Media from Brown University (2022), an MFA in Art Criticism and Writing from SVA (2012) and a BA in Comparative Literature from NYU (2008).