From Giza to Memphis: Christelle Oyiri's "Dead God Flow" @ CANK Berlin

Christelle Oyiri
Hauntology of an OG, 2025
Video still
Courtesy of the artist, the LAS Art Foundation, Amant, and the Pinault Collection

text by Arlo Kremen
photography by Jacopo La Forgia
images by Christelle Oyiri and Neva Wireko

For Berlin Art Week, artist Christelle Oyiri teamed up with CEL, a freshly formed Black, female art collective, and Las Foundations to bring Berlin her first installation in the city at CANK in Neukölln, a retired 1950s mall turned event space. The exhibition shows alongside an event series by CEL called “Foundations.” One such event transformed the space into a nightclub of sorts, bringing several DJs to perform with Oyiri, who performs under the stage name Crystalmess, to headline. Unfortunately, Oyiri could not make it due to flight issues beyond her control, but its impact on the installation site remained palpable.

The installation sees CANK’s spacious second floor emptied. On one side, CEL projects a short film of their own; the other hosts two films of Oyiri’s, Hyperfate (2022) and Hauntology of an OG (2025). Between the two ends, darkness fills in the gap, with green and blue overhead fluorescents bleeding in and out to choral-like, electronic waves. Obscure darkness swells, not just with light, but also with something else, a numinous effect common to nightlife—a world in which, ideally, freedom is sovereign and individuals can collect into a symbiotic ecosystem, where, as Oyiri put it in an interview, music produces “unspoken connections.”

Christelle Oyiri
Dead God Flow, 2025
Courtesy of the artist, the LAS Art Foundation, Amant, and the Pinault Collection

Born and raised in the Paris region to Ivorian and Guadeloupean parents, Christelle Oyiri brings much of herself to her art practice. As an artist who occupies the nightlife world, she demonstrates great care for the poetics and politics of music and musicians, especially those of rap and rappers, the subject of her two films in Dead God Flow, where music brings her to look upon herself and her history in relation to these figures in Hyperfate and to adventure to Memphis, Tennessee, to look up close at one of southern rap’s capitals in Hauntology of an OG.

Hyperfate studies systems of power and surveillance within rap culture. Oyiri traces the culture’s relationship with death, noting how a rapper’s trajectory can significantly affect the probability of their death. The figure of the rapper, a sign of wealth and success, often becomes a target of envy and ridicule, particularly for rappers who come from gang-affiliated backgrounds. Such a dynamic only becomes exacerbated by constant self-surveillance online. It is through her reflection that Oyiri posits that the rap industry became so bloodied, thinking of rappers like Tupac, XXXTENTACION, Pop Smoke, and Takeoff as figures drawn to their premature deaths as prophecy, which is horrifically par for the course of their trade, dying by the same hand that gave them glory.

Oyiri ties in her own biography into the narrative, discussing her older brother’s path to winning the European championship inThai boxing and sharing footage of her childhood apartment building. Her filmed documentary footage, whether in Paris or driving around Pop Smoke’s neighborhood, Canarsie, Brooklyn, cuts between rappers’ IG lives and stories, images and videos of her and her family, and a supernova, grouping personal narrative with the historical to sublimate it. The question of prophetic deaths and material realities of racial capitalism becomes enlarged, cosmic questions with existentially urgent consequences.

Developed alongside photographer Veva Wireko in Memphis, Tennessee, and narrated by poet-rapper Darius Phatmak Clayton, Hauntology of an OG positions Memphis as a reference to ancient Egypt, with one pyramid serving as a parallel to the other. Oyiri understands the pyramid as a symbol of “death, continuity, and hierarchy,” looping the pyramid on the Mississippi River into a symbolic lineage that speaks directly to the contexts in which Memphis rap emerged—namely, the end of the futurity expressed by Martin Luther King Jr. after his death in 1968. Giving his last speech in Memphis, Oyiri sees the city’s rap culture as somewhat of an elegy to this snuffed-out dream. A since-past desire for an alternative future tormented by the vitriolic racism Black Americans endure, particularly in the poor, Bible Belt city of Memphis, where this past April, Clayborn Temple, a Black church community center and the historic organizing point for King Jr., was intentionally burned down. 

Christelle Oyiri
Hauntology of an OG, 2025
Courtesy of the artist, the LAS Art Foundation, Amant, and the Pinault Collection

The pyramid’s construction was completed in 1991 and was intended to serve as an entertainment venue for concerts and sports. However, today, the structure is a shopping center, housing the Bass Pro Shop megastore, among other commercial enterprises. Rather than a theological monument to a deceased pharaoh, Memphis’s pyramid memorializes and upholds the economic episteme that produced it, liberal capitalism; thus, Memphis rap produces a different monument, a sonic architecture dedicated to histories of struggle. The show’s title, Dead God Flow, refers to Nietzsche’s “God is Dead” concept, where Oyiri witnesses Nietzsche’s epistemic utterance in Memphis’s rappers, hearing in their flows a call for a new future.

Dead God Flow is presented by LAS Art Foundation and is on view through October 19 @ CANK, Karl-Marx-Straße 95, Berlin-Neukölln

Dudu Quintanilha's Prophetic Complaints Explores the Act of Being in Public @ PSM

Dudu Quintanilha’s exhibition, Prophetic Complaints, features mostly videos that debate the (im-)possibilities of living together, generating belonging, recognition and social responsibility through research on verbal complaints. At PSM, Quintanilha reformulates the exhibition, adapting it to the gallery's exhibition space through performative collaborations with members of the Blaumeier-Atelier from Bremen, a project that since 1986 has been developing art projects with neurodivergent people in diverse fields such as theater, music, painting, photography, and literature. In addition, he invited the group MEXA from São Paulo – of which Quintanilha is a founding member — to occupy the gallery's "Loggia" and set up their own exhibition, 69 Rooms H&V.

The need to acknowledge the humanhood of marginalized individuals is very prominent in Quintanilha’s work with MEXA. The transdisciplinary art group is composed of people from various minority social groups which in Brazil are under permanent threat. The group embraces mainly transgender, gay, and Black people, whose elaborate performances and theater plays highlight their marginalized social condition in Brazil as a means of opposing discrimination and systemic violence. In the exhibition 69 Rooms H&V, MEXA is showing text-based works produced since the group was created in 2015 after violent events occurred in shelters for vulnerable people in São Paulo.

Prophetic Complaints and 69 Rooms H&V are on view through September 2nd at PSM, Schöneberger Ufer 61, 10785 Berlin.

Persons Projects Examines the Influence of The Helsinki School Perspective @ Both of Their Gallery Spaces in Berlin

Persons Projects’ summer exhibition, The Helsinki School Perspective, is presented in both gallery spaces Lindenstr. 34 and 35, featuring a selection of artists, all of whom had pivotal roles in the beginning of the Helsinki School. The exhibition is dedicated to the historical aspect, exploring how these artists use the photographic processes as a voice for abstraction and a tool for interpreting their emotional landscapes. The Helsinki School platform was created by Timothy Persons in the 1990s, who became inspired by his experience with the Open Studio Concept that was popular during his graduate studies in the mid-1970s in Southern California. It grew to become the most extended sustainable educational platform of its kind consisting of six generations of selected MA students originating from the University of Art and Design, Helsinki, Finland. There are now more than 180 monogram books and 6 volumes of the Helsinki School book that have evolved from this program. This exhibition is curated to reintroduce a new perspective on the conceptual roots that built The Helsinki School.

Part 1 features work by Niko Luoma, Ea Vasko, Mikko Sinervo, and Nanna Hänninen. In Part 1, we experience four different approaches to how these selected artists use the photographic process to abstract a moment in time, the passage of a day, a memory of a specific place, or the interpretation of a historical painting.

Part 2 features work by Anni Leppälä, Janne Lehtinen, Miklos Gaál, and Ilkka Halso, artists who form a unique image that transcends how we interpret our personal, social, and ecological landscape seeing through a Nordic approach to nature.

Niko Luoma
Self-Titled Adaptation of Le Rêve (1932), (2015)
From the series Adaptions
Archival pigment print, Diasec
193 x 155 cm
© the artist, courtesy: Persons Projects

Niko Luoma
Self-Titled Adaptation of Caryatid (1913), (2018)
From the series Adaptations
Archival pigment print, Diasec
128 x 103 cm
© the artist, courtesy: Persons Projects

The Helsinki School Perspective is on show July 1st to September 9th at Persons Projects, Lindenstraße 34-35, 10969 Berlin

Tina Born's Communal Dreamscape "Gonfanon" @ Laura Mars Gallery

Tina Born
Detail from 60 Jahre träumen (60 years of dreaming) (2023)
Excerpts from a collection of texts, DIN A4 papers, ballpoint pen, glass, metal, wood
approx. 300 x 40 x 3 cm
Copyright by the artist. Courtesy Laura Mars Gallery, Berlin

For her 4th solo exhibition at the Laura Mars Gallery, Tina Born presents an expansive installation entitled Gonfanon. The impetus here is dreams—those "hallucinatory" events that take place when the body is at rest. Evading clear interpretations and conclusions, but creating spaces for interpretation and, as it were, those "snippets" that we often only remember after the dream event, the artist arranges sculpture, found and built objects as well as excerpts from a collection of texts. The latter (60 Jahre träumen, 2023) are Born's own dream notes, which she collected over the years and now assigns to dates spanning a period of 60 years. Based on Arthur Rimbaud's statement, "I am another / I am another" or "I am many." Tina Born, in a further step, asked sixty people from her environment to transcribe these notes in their respective handwriting.

 
 

Gonfanon is on view until July 29th at Laura Mars Gallery, Bülowstraße 52, 10783 Berlin

REALITYBYTES Warps The Virtual World @ panke.gallery in Berlin

REALITYBYTES is a web-browser plugin that substitutes images and photographs on cnn.com, thesun.co.uk and pornhub.com with AI-generated counterparts. 

The plugin blurs the boundary between AI-created and human-created images, delivering results that are both uncanny and humorous. At the same time, it provides a stark insight into the racism and biases deeply ingrained within AI, spotlighting AI's growing influence on image perception and representation. 

Next to this, a broadcast entirely authored by an artificial intelligence will be presented. The presentation not only probes the ethics and reliability of AI-generated content but also challenges us to question the integrity of the content we routinely absorb in this era where AI is omnipresent.

Lotte Louise de Jong is a media artist from the Netherlands with a background in film-making. Her work ranges from physical, digital and online installations to more traditional forms of narrative. Her practice addresses how we, as a society, view and shape our identity through mediated spaces like the digital world. The internet as a space for exploring intimacy has been the main focus of her past projects. She obtained a master’s degree in Fine Art and Design at the Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam in 2019. In 2020 she received an emerging artist grant from the Mondriaan Fonds. 

REALITYBYTES is available for download here and will be on view through July 8th at panke.gallery, Hof V, Gerichtstraße 23, 13347 Berlin

Werner Büttner's "Malerei 1982-2022" @ Galerie Max Hetzler

Malerei 1981–2022 is a solo exhibition of Werner Büttner’s work at Galerie Max Hetzler, Bleibtreustraße 45 and 15/16 in Berlin. This is the artist's tenth solo exhibition with the gallery.

Absurdity, irony and ambivalence play a central role in Werner Büttner's paintings, which gained recognition in the late 1970s under the term ‘Bad Painting’. Motifs of classical modernism are reworked, sometimes with the help of linguistic elements, and thus become unflinching commentaries on society and the broader condition humaine. ‘The generation before us – the conceptual artists – had declared painting as an outdated, bourgeois medium to be abolished. This prohibition had to be broken by us descendants, out of defiance, for distinction, and because the laws of generation demand it. And so, in juvenile presumption, I took hold of almost all known categories of painting – still lifes, self-portraits, animal pictures, seascapes, history painting, religious subjects, etc.’, the artist explains.

This exhibition comprises works from a creative period of over 40 years, offering an impressive insight into Büttner's practice. The impasto painting, applied in rapid brushstrokes and alla prima (wet- on-wet), lends the works a coarseness that is further emphasised by the typical artist's frames made of wooden slats. Isolated splashes and streaks of paint, created by the explosive movements of the brush, reinforce the dynamism and power of the paintings. In the later works, this fast technique is replaced by a more precise painterly style, yielding images with a greater intellectual and visual subtlety. A block of drawings and a group of sculptures by the artist will also be shown at Bleibtreustraße 15/16.

 
 

Malerei 1981-2022 is on view until August 19th at Galerie Max Hetzler, Bleibtreustraße 45 and 15/16, 10623 Berlin

On the Politics of Delicacy @ Capitain Petzel in Berlin

On the Politics of Delicacy is a group exhibition conceived around the Robert Anton Theatre Collection. In the early 1970s Robert Anton (1949-1984) created a surreal miniature theatre which quickly achieved cult status and fascinated audiences both in the US and Europe. By bringing together multiple influences – from Antonin Artaud’s writings on the Theatre of Cruelty, alchemist principles of transformation and hybridity, post-WWI characters of George Grosz and Otto Dix, to the eccentric creatures of Hieronymus Bosch; but also early Hollywood and Disney motives, Federico Fellini’s baroque fantasies, and pop cultural impulses of his era – Anton created a unique visual language. Due to the intimacy of his performances which often took place in his loft with a maximum capacity of 18 spectators, his plays remained something of New York’s best-kept secret, a refuge into the surreal imaginary. The exhibition gives insight into Anton’s work by showing his intriguingly sculpted figurines (effectively, his ‘actors’), props and drawings.

At Capitain Petzel, curator Anke Kempkes contextualises the oeuvre of Robert Anton for the first time by unfolding thematic trajectories that resonate with his work, namely the politics of the home theatre, surrealist political theatre, the concept of ‘monstrosity’ in postwar female avant-garde sculpture, a new female painterly symbolism, and queer performativity in times of political polarization. With such specific trajectories in mind, a dynamic dialogue takes place between Anton’s oeuvre and works permeating both genre and epoch by German Dada artist Hannah Höch and Spanish poet and theatre director Federico García Lorca; Anton’s theatre pioneer contemporary Tadeusz Kantor and scenographer Kazimierz Wisniak; works by Wanda Czelkowska and Liliane Lijn; post-modernist and queer artists from East and West Duggie Fields, Jimmy De Sana, Krzysztof Jung, Raúl Martínez and Zoe Leonard; and contemporary artists Yael Bartana, Joanna Piotrowska, Stanislava Kovalcikova, Karolina Jablonska, Mikolaj Sobczak, Nicholas Grafia, Billy Morgan and Uel.

On the Politics of Delicacy is on view throughout February 22 at Capitain Petzel Karl-Marx-Allee 45, 10178 Berlin. photographs courtesy of the gallery

Frank Mädler's Teile der Vernunft @ Galerie Susanne Albrecht in Berlin

Fundamentally, Frank Mädler is a doubter, and precisely for this reason he chose – well before the era of Photoshop – the camera as his medium. Whatever the camera documents must exist, it has objectivity. But behind the camera is a human being who determines how the camera works and what is photographed. So objectivity is already in doubt: it, too, is subjective, the camera gives the photographer enough leeway to lend the objects his subjective image. That is what characterises him: he interprets the world with the aid of the camera. So is man the creator of the objects? Does his eye determine how they appear?

These questions come to mind when we look at Frank Mädler’s photographs. They transform banal, familiar everyday things into independent pictures and give them a new meaning. Birds become blurs of light blue, water lilies are turned into dazzling monumental sculptures with many colours, and even the sea does not appear blue or gray, but rather beige, in a strange light that the photographer did not manipulate in any way.

Teile der Vernunft is on view throughout February 8, 2020 at Galerie Susanne Albrecht Bleibtreustr. 48, 10623 Berlin. photographs courtesy of the gallery