Christelle Oyiri

Curated by Abiba Coulibaly, this programme presents a selection of the films of multidisciplinary artist and DJ Christelle Oyiri aka Crystallmess. Born to Ivorian and Guadeloupean parents in the suburbs of Paris, Oyiri’s self-scored video art explores the avant-gardism and visual vernacular of black diasporic and digital youth culture. An ascendant force in audiovisual culture, Oyiri’s practice has seen her named winner of the 2024 PONTOPREIS MMK and the inaugural recipient of the Tate Modern’s Infinities Commission. Addressing themes spanning racialised spectacle, colonial spectre in and beyond museums, sonic and club culture(s), mythmaking and cosmology, her body of moving image work is presented in its completion and outside of the gallery context for the first time in the UK.

Collective Amnesia: In Memory of Logobi and War! Club! Action! traces the genealogies of Côte d'Ivoire’s highly politicised, diasporic dance music while incorporating found footage and karaoke. Hyperfate is a personal meditation on the gendered necropolitics of the US Rap industrial complex and the director’s hometown. GROTESQUE: They make beautiful things about ugly people, is a nocturnal sojourn in the Louvre’s Egyptian antiquities collection, while I See You follows the gazes of the self-appointed guardians of the notorious Fauvettes estate ahead of its imminent demolition.

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Showing as part of Open City Documentary Festival