Crystal Skulls and Church Fires: Christelle Oyiri’s “Belief May Vary" @ Amant in New York

text by Arlo Kremen

Christelle Oyiri’s solo debut in the US is at Amant, where she continues her investigation of myth-making as an infinite process informed by the continuous need to repatch and adapt to new conditions. Much like her show in Berlin at CANK, Belief May Vary situates Hauntology of an OG (2025) at the heart of this show, but a multiplicity of other media spring from the walls—bas-relief, photography, and sculpture that serve to expand on Oyiri’s film and sharpen its focus.

Hauntology draws heavily on the Memphis Pyramid’s symbolic potential. Clarifying the object through its parallel in the Giza Pyramids, tombs of pharaohs, and monuments to death, faith, and earthly transcendence, the Memphis Pyramid carries a uniquely American interpolation of these associations. Once a sports stadium called the “Tomb of Doom,” it is now home to the largest Bass Pro Shop in the country, a capitalist tourist attraction that brings droves to Memphis to witness this postmodern World Wonder. Today, the Pyramid is a hotel, restaurant, and shopping center, but between 2002 and 2006, it served as a site of worship. The Church of God in Christ held holy convocations in the Pyramid, gathering thousands for their assemblies. Another congregation considered buying the Pyramid during a period of uncertainty and economic failure. Pastor Gary Faulkner, whose 5,000-member congregation filled three different locations for Sunday services, saw the economic drag the structure had on the city, so he offered a solution. He also planned to develop commercial outlets to support the building financially. This offer overlapped with the city’s deal with Bass Pro Shop, which eventually won out. If not, the Pyramid would most likely have been demolished.

Christelle Oyiri and Neva Wireko
Hauntology of an OG (still), 2025
Courtesy of the artists; Amant, Brooklyn, NY; LAS Art Foundation, Berlin; and Pinault Collection, Paris

The Pyramid is undergirded by histories of capitalist spectacle, faith, and the looming threat of destruction, making Oyiri’s Egyptian comparison all the more prescient—how did faith get here? The Parisian filmmaker represents this history without judgment or any moral lashings, using local Memphis lo-fi visuals to probe the Pyramid on its own terms. In collaboration with Memphis poet and rapper Darius Phatmak Clayton and a sample from Princess Loko on her original synth-driven composition, the artist collapses the city’s past and present to unveil the failed futures that continue to mold how faith operates in Memphis.

Hauntology contends with, along with the Pyramid, the burning of Clayborn Temple, which horrifically occurred during her filming trip. Clayborn Temple was a home to a historical Black Presbyterian congregation and was heavily involved with the Memphis Sanitation Workers’ strike in 1968. The church had a similarly sizable involvement in the 1960s civil rights movement as a center for grassroots organizers. Clayborn Temple was a beacon of light for racial equality, an equality that never really occurred as originally intended, with economic devastation marking this majority Black city. Oyiri stills the frame of Clayborn Temple’s burning in CNC-milled polyurethane resin on a wall for Melting Temple (2026). She marks the front of the church and miraculously standing remains of the structure in gold acrylic, while the ongoing fire is left nearly absent; its plumes are signaled by a topographic texture, pushing into and away from the viewer’s space. Rather than propounding destruction, the artist uplifts architectural endurance amidst apocalypse.

Christelle Oyiri
Melting Temple, 2026
CNC milled polyurethane resin, acrylic
Courtesy of the artist

Christelle Oyiri
REVELATION SYSTEM, 2026
CNC milled polyurethane resin and clear urethane resin, acrylic
Courtesy of the artist and Gathering, London/Ibiza

REVELATION SYSTEM (2026) combined CNC milled polyurethane resin and clear urethane resin to create a model of the Memphis Pyramid. Painted in gold to also mimic the Pyramids of Giza, the tip of the tetrahedron, buried in clear resin, is a skull. The myth goes as such: construction workers uncovered a metal box attached to the top of the pyramid, inside of which laid a crystal skull placed there by Isaac Tigrett to “ward off evil spirits.” The skull was displaced, and Tigrett forewarned that a curse would be cast on the new entertainment space. Several misfortunes befell the pyramid—sewage floods and facilities that fell below NBA standards, leading to substantial renovations that had little effect. The space was closed and practically abandoned for most of 2007 to 2015. REVELATION SYSTEM brings this folktale to the fore, situating it within a greater historical context of a snuffed-out future of racial freedom and prosperity that is particularly felt in a city like Memphis, which was a hub for much of the US’s grassroots civil rights activism.

Christelle Oyiri
ALL ABOUT MONEY — DJ SQUEEKY, 2025
Aluminum-charged polyurethane resin foam, aluminum, acrylic
Edition of 5 + 1AP
Courtesy of the artist, and Galerie Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne/New York

Oyiri similarly positions two other myth systems as existing in the wake of the promises of the civil rights movement: rap and the Black Hebrew Israelites. On the far wall of the show, cassette-shaped plaques monumentalize foundational Memphis rappers 8Ball & MJG, Tommy Wright III, Three Six Mafia, and DJ Squeeky. These figures, along with those memorialized in Hauntology—Princess Loko, Gangsta Boo, Young Dolph, Lord Infamous, and Big Scarr—managed to create light from the immense darkness and subjugation at the root of America’s racial capitalism. The cassette was the earliest form of quick dissemination, spreading the words of these legendary sonic architects. In Clayton’s words, “music possesses souls.”

Christelle Oyiri
I DON’T TRUST A SINGLE IMAGE BECASUE I SAW THE TRUTH FROM TWO ANGLES, 2026
Framed lenticular print
Courtesy of the artist

The Black Hebrew Israelites speak on the street while, presumably, the photographer tape-records them. I DON’T TRUST A SINGLE IMAGE BECAUSE I SAW THE TRUTH FROM TWO ANGLES (2026) embodies the quality of the image’s lenticular print, adapting to its spectator’s movements with its three-dimensional illusion. Here, it seems as though Oyiri begs for different treatment of the Black Hebrew Israelites, as, like the other faith systems present in Belief May Vary: racial capitalism’s persistence is the site in which all of these beliefs can be sourced. Words of God do not come from a void; they can always be traced to a rupture, referring to the artist’s continued exploration of how faith and belief are rarely sourced purely from doctrine and are instead informed and sculpted by survival and endurance. Oyiri proposes a balanced consideration of belief as mutable and ever-evolving, often drawing on  social ruptures as a vehicle for faith’s transformations. To quote Clayton once more, “Not only roses but honeysuckle bushes too grow from concrete.”

Belief May Vary is on view through August 16th @ Amant 315 Maujer Street, Brooklyn.

Mathilde Denize's Sound of Figures Reverberates Through Perrotin in New York

The melodic sensibility of Mathilde Denize’s visual style is at the center of Sound of Figures at Perrotin in New York. Reused from film sets, her materials are born-again into an environment that is altogether new. Denize’s combination of painting, sculpture, and figure feels almost archaeological—we are transported to a retrospective that is not actually of the past. 

Her use of color and form might match stereotypical notions of femininity, but her finished products are anything but. Denize’s paintings are akin to faces printed with makeup—picture a cheek coated in blush. There’s a corporeality to her two-dimensional work that makes it feel as though it’d be warm to the touch.

The entrancing and other-worldly nature of her work speaks to a certain feminine mystique contemporarily neglected in favor of a testosterone-centric mainstream. Using an impressive amalgamation of material and medium, Denize plays the song of a nuanced female experience without having to produce any noise.

Sound of Figures is on view through February 19 at Perrotin, 130 Orchard Street, New York, NY, 10002

Fall into a crevice of the human mind @ Perrotin in New York

text by Mia Milosevic

Jesper Just’s surrealist film, Interfears, is an eerie dreamscape documenting the neurological manifestation of emotion. The film, alongside an accompanying series of MRI prints, is currently on view at Perrotin in New York until December 21. 

On the second floor of 130 Orchard Street, positioned in a dark enclave to the left of the hallway, is Jesper Just’s neuroscientific pursuit into the emotional mind. Starring Academy Award nominee Matt Dillon, the film on display documents his character in a state of relative turmoil. He recites a monologue from the discomfort of an fMRI, which highlights the entrapment of the mind in its own neural net. As Dillon endeavors to portray an invented character, Interfears logs his authentic response, dismantling the separation generally accredited to the actor and his assigned role.

Breaking from conventional narrative structure, the film leverages MRI technology to aesthetically analyze emotional processing. The utilization of the clinical, private space strategically enunciates the natural paranoia our own minds force upon us in moments of solitude. Broadcasted on the ceiling of the otherwise sterile environment is a blue sky and a collection of palm trees. This illumination, amidst the otherwise corporate ceiling, starkly contrasts the internal neural processing of the character lying beneath it. Our own ironic sense of confinement, in contrast to the abyss which remains consistently above us, becomes jarringly apparent.

Facing the film, alongside the viewers, are three MRI prints which display brain activity via coloration of varying human emotions–terror, joy, and sadness. To witness movement on the MRI when someone is organizing their memories and thoughts is separative in a way that is abstractly terrifying. It doesn’t feel like we should be able to see the sensations which we might already doubt the legitimacy of. Further, the assignment of a region on the brain to one emotion or another actually does the opposite to demystifying the concept of our own emotional sourcing. Just’s propensity to provoke further inquiry is writ large. 

The cinematic musical composition is dreamlike for the entirety of the film, its resonance reminiscent of the distance we generally feel between action and volition when in the thick of a bad dream. Gustave Mahler’s Fifth Symphony Adagietto both activates and follows Dillon’s affective voyage throughout the piece, exploiting the role of sound in emotional exploration.

At one point in the film, Dillon recounts what appears to be a distant and potentially aversive memory.

“I’m outside the concert hall on the stairs.

My face, numb and freezing.

I hear laughter.

Golden light.

Red velvet seats.”

The image is vivid, and the description relatable. The dimly lit hue of Dillon’s memory is grounded by the environment it’s recounted in.

Installation view of Jesper Just’s Interfears at Perrotin New York, 2024. ©Jesper Just 2024. Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin.

Interfears is on view through December 21 @ Perrotin, 130 Orchard Street New York, NY 10002

Absorb the Color of Late Capitalism in Baby Blue Benzo @ 52 Walker

David Zwirner at 52 Walker in New York City announces its thirteenth exhibition, Baby Blue Benzo, which features work by Canadian-born, New York–based artist Sara Cwynar. This presentation focuses on a new film—for which the show is titled—shot on both digital video and 16mm and projected at monumental scale. To complement Baby Blue Benzo, a series of related photographs will be installed throughout the gallery space.

Engaging with vernacular photography and the moving image, as well as their attendant technologies, Cwynar’s practice—which also includes collage, installation, and performance—explores how pictorial constructs and their related systems of power feed back into real life. Such projects as Rose Gold (2017) and Baby Blue Benzo consider color—namely, how its use and value are constantly renegotiated by the shifting conditions of consumerism, technology, and desire. Drawing from her background in graphic design and a lineage of postwar conceptual photography, Cwynar tampers with visual signifiers to deconstruct notions of power and recontextualize image culture in late capitalism.

In her new film, Cwynar combines newly produced video and photographs with found images amassed in her archive. The principal scenes for Baby Blue Benzo were filmed at a studio in Los Angeles, where Cwynar staged a surrealistic shoot—featuring two sets of circular camera tracks—with massive props and elaborate historical costumes that became a kind of stand-in for the artifice and arbitrariness of composing images. The artwork’s central visual pillar is a replica of the titular 1955 Mercedes-Benz 300 SLR, which is to date the most expensive car to be sold at auction.

Baby Blue Benzo is on view through December 21 @ 52 Walker Street, New York City