Christelle Oyiri: Dead God Flow | CEL: Foundations

Dead God Flow 

›Dead God Flow‹is the first installation in Berlin by artist, DJ, and producer Christelle Oyiri. It is an audiovisual environment that brings together video, sound, and spatial design. 

At its core is the video ›Hauntology of an OG‹, which Christelle Oyiri developed with Ghanian-Canadian photographer Neva Wireko during a research journey through Memphis, Tennessee—a city whose name refers to ancient Egypt. Narrated by rapper and poet Darius Phatmak Clayton, the piece braids together histories of conflict and monuments. It refers to the Memphis Pyramid on the banks of the Mississippi, standing like a mirror to Giza, Egypt, and »echoing a lineage of grandeur and grief«—as the artist describes. In Memphis, Tennessee, we also encounter the church where Martin Luther King made his final public speech and trace how, with his assasination, dreams of an alternative future were lost. In this landscape, the city’s rap emerges as an architecture of sound.

›Hauntology of an OG‹, directed by Christelle Oyiri and Neva Wireko, is a co-commission by LAS Art Foundation and Amant, with support from Pinault Collection. 

»Dead God Flow reimagines the exhibition space as a coded séance, a choreography of image, sound, and presence where the past and future refuse to separate. In it, structures meant to outlast centuries, from limestone pyramids to the modern pyramid that haunts Memphis, stand as monuments to innovation, each encoded with technologies of survival. Against this backdrop, Memphis rap emerges as a sonic architecture, dark, ritualistic, and unflinchingly inventive, yet born within the strict moral codes of the Bible Belt. The work carries these tensions, layering them with the sampled voice of rapper Princess Loko, whose cadence becomes both an elegy and a resurrection. Within this charged terrain, death is not an ending but a loop, a broken god’s beat still pulsing.«

— Christelle Oyiri

Foundations 

›Foundations‹ begins a long-term, touring project by art collective CEL. CEL’s aim is to platform Black art, music and creative activism in new ways and thereby foster alternative ecosystems for artists to thrive. Their live event series, presented by LAS Art Foundation at Cank, invites us to consider alternative futures through DJ-nights, performances, workshops and talks. Led by multidisciplinary artists Shannen SP and GLOR1A, CEL grows out of the exhibition Nine Nights: Channel B, which they co-presented at the ICA London in 2021. 

›Foundations‹ launches at 21:00 on Thursday, 11 September, with a DJ night featuring Shannen SP and a line-up of local and international artists.

»We are an autonomous space carved from the Black imagination, a travelling, mutating cell that can be activated anywhere in the world. With Foundations, we aim to launch the first module of an ongoing and international project exploring Black futurity and creative resistance. Through performance, sharings and radical imagination, Foundations seeks to prototype an alternative infrastructure for thriving—one where Black and diasporic artists can explore notions of self and collective preservation in a landscape of precarity, political divide, and planetary decline.«

— CEL

About  

Christelle Oyiri:

Christelle Oyiri is an artist, DJ and producer based in Paris. She works across multiple disciplines—from music and film to performance and installation—often exploring under-the-surface stories about contemporary culture, media and identity. Oyiri has described her work as focusing on ‘the things that lie between the lines’, including lost mythologies, youth subcultures, and diasporic histories. She has staged installations, performances and events around the world, including at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, Haus der Kunst in Munich, Tramway in Glasgow and the Serpentine Gallery in London, as well as working as a DJ under the pseudonym CRYSTALMESS. LAS Art Foundation’s presentation of Oyiri follows exhibitions in 2025 at Tate Modern’s Tanks and a presentation at Bourse de Commerce, Paris, as part of their Corps et âmes exhibition.

CEL:

CEL is a Black, female art collective founded by interdisciplinary artists Shannen SP and GLOR1A. Their collaboration started in 2020 as part of the collective Nine Nights TV, where they worked to platform Black culture in response to the persistent undervaluing of Black lives, the growing protest movements and the pandemic’s impact on nightlife and live music. CEL is a newly formed collective that focuses on Black art preservation and resistance, tackling systemic racial inequalities in the arts and the global music industry by exploring new modes of artistic empowerment. CEL aims to support Black and diaspora artists in building a new ecosystem that enables artists to thrive in the future.