by Eve Rogers // Nov. 11, 2025
This article is part of our feature topic Ghosts.
Christelle Oyiri’s ‘Dead God Flow’ is hardly a temple for quiet contemplation. Rather, its visitors are plunged directly into the DJ-turned-artist’s natural habitat: the nightclub. Entry comes through a cavernous industrial elevator, its interior already vibrating with bass that feels almost corporeal, a pulse belonging to the ghosts of nights past. When the doors part, the effect is immediate and disorienting. Strobe lights in green and blue slice the darkness in sync with fractured samples, while dry ice coils through the air like a specter, its acrid scent summoning half-remembered scenes of ecstatic dissolution.
Christelle Oyiri: ‘Dead God Flow,’ 2025, installation view at Cank, Berlin, presented by LAS Art Foundation // Courtesy the artist, LAS Art Foundation, Amant and Pinault Collection, © 2025 Christelle Oyiri, photo by Jacopo La Forgia
A monumental black pyramid emerges, equal parts nightclub altar and funerary tomb, directing attention to the two consecutive video works that structure the exhibition. Congregants are summoned to the deep, dark steps that cut into the belly of the structure. I take a pew and settle in for the sermon.
‘Hyperfate’ unfolds as a meditation on prophecy, spectacle and the spectral afterlives of rap. Combining the grainy textures of internet culture with cosmic imagery, Oyiri crafts a work that oscillates between elegy and critique, in which the figure of the rapper emerges as both martyr and gladiator.
Christelle Oyiri: ‘Dead God Flow,’ 2025, installation view at Cank, Berlin, presented by LAS Art Foundation // Courtesy the artist, LAS Art Foundation, Amant and Pinault Collection, © 2025 Christelle Oyiri, photo by Jacopo La Forgia
The film opens with a supernova, the terminal brilliance of a dying star. This cosmological image frames Oyiri’s reflections on the premature deaths of artists such as 2pac, Pop Smoke and King Von as she wonders, “Did these young shooting stars already know their fate?” The question reverberates as both lament and speculation, musing over the sense that rap’s most tragic narratives feel at times predetermined. For these artists, death transpired to be not merely an end but a passage into myth, a coronation of martyrdom.
What ‘Hyperfate’ captures so acutely is the sense that rap has become a haunted genre. One might ask, as the work implicitly does, whether artists create under the shadow of this inevitability—whether their lyrics and performances are already charged with the anticipation of their posthumous reception. In this view, music becomes the site of a viable and resonant afterlife. Fame assumes the character of a new religion: notoriety as resurrection, legacy as salvation.
Christelle Oyiri: ‘Dead God Flow,’ 2025, installation view at Cank, Berlin, presented by LAS Art Foundation // Courtesy the artist, LAS Art Foundation, Amant and Pinault Collection, © 2025 Christelle Oyiri, photo by Jacopo La Forgia
Oyiri implicates herself in this mythology, recalling her shared birthday with Tupac Shakur. This autobiographical gesture is subtle but revealing, acknowledging that she too is susceptible to the seductions of fate, to the gravitational pull of predestination. With this, she refuses the position of detached commentator; instead, she situates herself within the very cosmology she critiques.
With a visual language firmly rooted in the digital sphere, the work employs screen recordings, Instagram Live broadcasts and the frenetic commentary of online followers to establish a visual grammar of exposure and surveillance. Oyiri’s analogy of social media as a modern colosseum is striking. Here, rappers are gladiators who enter the arena, offering themselves up to the mercy—or brutality—of their audience. The scrolling commentary functions as the crowd’s roar, shifting unpredictably from adoration to hostility. Visibility itself becomes lethal: the very mechanism of survival also delivers annihilation.
Periodically, Oyiri punctuates the flow with aphoristic quotes and fragments. Phrases hang in the air like incantations, crystallizing the paradoxes of rap’s cultural position: self-determination shadowed by violence, immortality achieved only through premature death, love that curdles into hatred.
Christelle Oyiri: ‘Dead God Flow,’ 2025, installation view at Cank, Berlin, presented by LAS Art Foundation // Courtesy the artist, LAS Art Foundation, Amant and Pinault Collection, © 2025 Christelle Oyiri, photo by Jacopo La Forgia
‘Hyperfate’ appears to be ultimately less about fate as metaphysical truth than about our compulsion to read narratives through its lens. By staging rap as a haunted form—at once prophecy, performance and funeral rite—it is revealed how a culture can consume its idols as fervently as it creates them.
If ‘Hyperfate’ is a meditation on martyrdom, ‘Hauntology of an OG’ shifts toward themes of inheritance. Here, Oyiri turns her attention to Memphis, a city that stands as both birthplace and burial ground in the history of Black America. Unquestionable mainstay of the musical canon, its streets produced Southern hip hop giants Three 6 Mafia, as well as being home to both soul and the blues. It’s also the city where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his final speech and the site of his subsequent assassination. In Oyiri’s hands, Memphis takes the form of a shadowy realm, where these narratives of survival, excess, tragedy and transcendence intertwine.
Christelle Oyiri and Neva Wireko: ‘Hauntology of an OG,’ 2025, videostill // Courtesy of LAS Art Foundation, Amant, und Pinault Collection, © Christelle Oyiri and Neva Wireko
The film takes its cue from Derrida’s concept of hauntology: the persistence of what has passed and the intrusion of what has not yet arrived. Memphis is staged as a city perpetually out of joint, where history lingers unresolved and the future arrives already haunted. The imagery is loaded with references to Southern Gothic—a genre of ghosts, ruins and rituals. Oyiri deftly collages references to William Faulkner’s haunted South, Arthur Jafa’s visual meditations on Blackness and the sonic menace of Memphis rap.
The imagery oscillates between sacred and profane, with strip clubs lit like infernal caverns and flames licking at futuristic skylines, at times accompanied by disembodied dulcet reassurances and devilish encouragements. Here the holy ghost coexists with hellfire, black magic with fibre optics, devotional ritual with hedonistic excess. In this ambivalent space, the South is recast as both ghostly past and speculative future.
Christelle Oyiri and Neva Wireko: ‘Hauntology of an OG,’ 2025, videostill // Courtesy of LAS Art Foundation, Amant, und Pinault Collection, © Christelle Oyiri and Neva Wireko
The Memphis Pyramid—an uncanny replica of Giza transplanted to Tennessee—appears onscreen as a shrine to mystery and commodity. Echoing both the geometry of the dollar bill and conspiratorial lore of the Illuminati, the central totem of the pyramid erupts into a cipher, causing geographical and temporal boundaries to quake, crumble and collide. Images of Egypt and America, antiquity and Afrofuturism, slavery and global capital both blur and dissolve. Around them shimmer eyes, hieroglyphs and the luminous silhouette of Africa—a semiotic cacophony that insists on both continuity and rupture.
Christelle Oyiri and Neva Wireko: ‘Hauntology of an OG,’ 2025, videostill // Courtesy of LAS Art Foundation, Amant, und Pinault Collection, © Christelle Oyiri and Neva Wireko
Where ‘Hyperfate’ dwells on artists consumed by fame, ‘Hauntology of an OG’ is concerned with how cultural forms persist. From the mournful refrains of the blues to the hypnotic chants of crunk, Oyiri traces a lineage of Black artistry as a chain of transmission through spectral presence. Made clear here is the understanding that cultural memory endures not through nostalgia or erasure, but by acknowledging its unresolved, living history. “Do you believe in ghosts, problem child?” it taunts, alluding that even if Black creativity could sever itself from these spectral inheritances, it would not—because they are its lifeblood. For Oyiri, the task is not to exorcise the ghosts, but to dance with them, inviting them in to animate the present and illuminate the future.
Emerging squinting through a side door into the daylight, the transition is abrupt. Akin to awakening from a sleepwalk, I have the disorienting and uncanny impression of being suddenly ejected from one world into another. A subtle sense of transformation lingers in its wake as the residue of the rite settles in—Oyiri’s ‘Dead God Flow’ is a welcome haunting.
