Dead God Flow
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In her new installation, Christelle Oyiri explores how imagined futures influence identity through music, sound and video.
On the occasion of Berlin Art Week, LAS Art Foundation presents a newly commissioned audio-visual installation, Christelle Oyiri Dead God Flow, at CANK in Neukölln, Berlin. 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 the core of the installation is the video Hauntology of an OG, which Christelle Oyiri developed with 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.
Screened alongside Hauntology of an OG is Hyperfate (2022), an earlier video by Oyiri which explores the mythologisation of deceased rappers and their canonization by fans as modern day saints.
Placed in a site-specific audiovisual environment at CANK, these works are each imbued with personal narrative. Examining martyrdom and memory, excellence and prophecy, they remind us, in Oyiri’s words, that “death is not an ending but a loop, a broken god’s beat still pulsing.”
"Dead God Flow reimagines the exhibition space as a coded , a choreography of image, sound, and presence where the past and future refuse to separate. [...] Memphis rap emerges as a sonic architecture, dark, ritualistic, and unflinchingly inventive, yet born within the strict moral codes of the . [...] Within this charged terrain, death is not an ending but a loop, a broken god’s beat still pulsing."
— Christelle Oyiri
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.
