Artists Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley and Josèfa Ntjam have combined their worlds to offer a unique immersive experience at FACT, Liverpool through April 9, 2023. This free exhibition explores acts of resistance, reconstruction and reimagining and how these can lead to transformative worlds. Both artists work through archives, maps and video games to show how our human behavior can be compared to natural processes.
Josèfa Ntjam re-examines post-colonial history and the transatlantic slave trade through her layered works that evoke counter-cultural movements and non-Western histories. In an interstellar subterranean cave filled with jellyfish, plankton, and fungi, she presents symbols of resistance, transformation, and freedom that draw on communication between natural life forms. Drawing parallels between our human behavior and natural processes, she demonstrates how spaces of solidarity, caring and revolution can thrive in the darkness.
Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley brings to life the imaginative visions of the Bandidos, a group of young people from Liverpool, by creating a video game that can be explored online and through four portals in the gallery. She asked these young people from Liverpool what they needed and what was missing from their world. She also archives the experiences of Black transgender people and communities that are often underserved.
Danielle’s Brathwaite-Shirley and Josèfa’s Ntjam worlds play with time to alter our view of the impact of the past on our present. This exhibition closes Radical Ancestry, FACT’s year-long exploration of belonging, a program of exhibitions, projects, residencies, and events that examines how history, geography, biology, and culture shape our ancestral story and questions how technology can help us explore new ways of thinking and experiencing who we are.
This exhibition is a true journey into the imagination of two committed artists who offer alternative and inspiring visions for transforming our world.