Portals, Paradox, and Performance: In Conversation with Christelle Oyiri

Known as much for her unpredictable DJ sets as for her conceptual installations, Paris-based artist, DJ and producer Christelle Oyiri moves fluently between sound, performance and image. Last month, Oyiri arrived in Berlin with Dead God Flow, her first installation in the city, presented by LAS Art Foundation and opened during Berlin Art Week. The solo exhibition, on view until 19 October, is staged as a séance, where history, myth, and music overlap in uncanny and unexpected ways. It follows a landmark commission at Tate Modern and comes just ahead of her upcoming presentation, Venom Voyage, with Gathering at Frieze London. If you haven’t gathered, Oyiri is very busy. In conversation with Something Curated’s Keshav Anand, the artist reflects on portals, paradoxes, and why both pyramids and basslines might be understood as monuments.

Keshav Anand: Dead God Flow reimagines the exhibition space as a “coded séance.” What first drew you to the idea of the séance as a structure for thinking about history, sound, and the future?

Christelle Oyiri: I think I’m naturally drawn to performing arts, theatre, etc., because of my backgrounds in both of these fields/mediums. I love the codified aspects of rituals and the fact that temporality can’t be rushed — you have to follow the steps closely. Not because they are rules to control you, but because they open a portal. Repetition opens a portal. I think I miss when I had to go through things and had to dive into somebody’s own curation, when I could not scroll away and close tabs.

KA: The video Hauntology of an OG traces connections between Memphis and ancient Egypt. What interested you in the idea of Memphis as a double, a kind of mirrored city?

CO: I have never been to Egypt. It’s a dream of mine and a place I fantasised about a lot as a kid, as I wanted to be an archaeologist (like a lot of kids that watched Jurassic Park or The Prince of Egypt once), and then later on when I discovered Nations Nègres et Culture by Cheikh Anta Diop — an extremely controversial book that still, to this day, has African, Black American, Caribbean thinkers’ panties in a bunch [laughs]. He shook the table hard with his thesis that ancient Egypt was fundamentally a Black civilisation, reclaiming Africa’s place at the very root of world history. There is no definitive truth to this thesis, but obviously Hauntology of an OG has this subtext as well.

The Pyramids of Giza and the ones in Nubia are the testimony of power, death and rituals, the shadows of great dynasties and systems. On the other hand, Memphis, Tennessee is a city haunted by its own ghosts. The fact they share a name is more than coincidence; it creates this uncanny mirror effect. Not going to lie, there’s also this ‘hotep’ echo to it: not just in the meme-y sense only, but in the idea of reaching back to Egypt as a site of origin, a place of power, and then seeing how that gets mirrored, distorted, even commodified in the Memphis Pyramid of today. It’s like the pyramid in Tennessee is both a mistranslation and a continuation of that lineage. A bit like the Cheikh Anta Diop essay in the first place.

KA: The sampling of Princess Loko’s voice brings questions of resurrection and survival into the work. How do you see sampling functioning beyond music, as a wider methodology in your practice?

CO: I think as a DJ, sequencing and manipulating other people’s archives is basically what you do — there is no broader agenda or wider methodology.

KA: Much of your work addresses the gaze — external, internal, digital. How do you navigate the paradox of using exhibition and performance, spaces built on visibility, to critique that gaze?

CO: Yeah, my work is always toying and looking back at this paradox. An exhibition literally puts you/your work on display, so I rather lean into the spectacle and use the mechanics of it. I don’t really think of it as escaping the gaze, but redirecting it.

KA: You often move between intimate histories — family photographs, diasporic memories — and vast infrastructures — pyramids, colonial economies. What holds those scales together in your thinking?

CO: Honestly, I don’t know [laughs]. I lowkey feel like you’re trying to ask me the core of my work… and I get the question, since the materiality of my work changes so often. I think and feel like we all operate in a system where the micro and the macro are constantly colliding, like Lyotard said about the postmodern condition: the “grand narratives” don’t hold on their own anymore, they’re always being challenged by smaller, fragmented stories. For me, those small stories are my family, the snapshots of memory I carry. The big structures are history, capitalism, colonialism, empire — they are here whether I want them or not. I love this idea of the grand collapse of the big narration, the big story.

What holds all this stuff together is the tension, the dissonance. I like mobilising philosophy because it gives me a framework to articulate what otherwise feels like pure chaos in my work. It’s not that I’m illustrating theory (but if some random publishing house wants to toss me a budget for a theory colouring book or some shit, you’re more than welcome). It’s more like I’m remixing it with my own lived experience. That way, both the intimate and the monumental feel like samples in the same track.

KA: Your Tate commission placed bronze self-portraits on speaker stacks, collapsing the body into sound. How do you think about the body as both medium and transmitter across your work?

CO: I originally got to presenting my art publicly through the medium of performance. That’s how I introduced myself as an artist in the art world first and foremost, so my body was always at the centre. That being said, my Infinities Commission PERPETUAL REMIX was not so much about the body as a ‘topic’, but more about how the body can function as a channel — something that carries sound, memory, and history. It’s accurate though: I do see the body as a vessel first and foremost. It absorbs, it projects outward. Even when I’m not literally performing, there’s always this sense that the body lingers in the work, whether through self-portraiture, scans, or even absence.

KA: To change pace for a moment — aside from home, where are your favourite places to eat in Paris?

CO: If, like me, you love authentic Japanese food and want to taste sake with friends, go to L’izayaka Paris on Notre-Dame-de-Lorette — you won’t be disappointed. Other than that, I love Touki Bouki, Bouyon Belleville, Jah Jah for African and Caribbean flavours, and Dalia if you love Levantine cuisine.

KA: And what are you currently reading?

CO: Currently I’m reading VIE MORT VIE (in English: LIFE. DEATH. LIFE) by my friend Chouf, published by Tumulte Editions. It’s essentially in French for the moment, I believe (TBC). It’s a glorious book about survival guilt — it’s beautiful, vivid, and accurate. The writing is out of this world.



Feature image: Christelle Oiyri. Photo: Alpha Medy