The artist, filmmaker and DJ reflects on the neo-diaspora, the politics of beauty, dance as resistance, and her current Tate Modern commission — a sonic-visual work that weaves together memory, protest, and digital vernaculars. Words by Katrina Nzegwu. All photography by Saffron Liberty.
Based in Paris, Christelle Oyiri is the embodiment of the modern renaissance woman — a visual artist, filmmaker and producer, also known by her DJ name, CRYSTALMESS. With an output that traverses the felt and the thought, the sensible and the intangible, Oyiri’s practice is in service of a new model of neodiaspora: an ode to those whose subjectivities have been built from a kaleidoscope of sociocultural fragments, and to the events, movements, and persons from which those fragments have splintered.
I had the pleasure of speaking to Oyiri on the occasion of her new work for Tate Modern — the inaugural Infinities Commission — touching upon cultural fluidity, trans-disciplinary languages, and dance as resistance.
Katrina Nzegwu: Your practice is multi- and inter-disciplinary — you work across film, music and sound, performance and light, as well as tour as a producer and DJ. How do you balance these different aspects — do you think of them as distinct practices? Do you feel one discipline calls to you principally, or does this shift and change?
Christelle Oyiri: I’m at peace with the idea of a joyful cohabitation. I realised that music was always about immediacy and sensation; it’s visceral and allows me to connect with people almost instantly, whereas practices like video, sculpture, and so on are more inquiry-driven for me.
There are periods where one medium feels more urgent or resonant than the other, often in response to internal shifts or external opportunities. For example, touring as a DJ might dominate for a season, which then feeds into sound design ideas or sparks a visual concept for a performance piece.
You grew up in Paris and have Ivorian, Martinican, and Guadeloupian heritage. How do you think this confluence has come to bear on your aesthetic frames of reference? What is the role of this multiplicity within your creative output?
It gave me an amazing and all-purpose artistic toolbox! Multiplicity and even contradictions help with what I do. I tackled untold stories and the tourism industrial complex in the show Venom Voyage (2023), which refers to Guadeloupe and Martinique a lot, and the Vindicta series (2022), in which I did UV prints of plexiglas. My sonic quest regarding Ivorian music was more of a subject earlier in my career. That layered identity shapes everything I do, whether consciously or not.
A profound point of resonance for me in your work is its engagement with the sensibility of the neodiaspora — the shifting relationships of second and third generation immigrant children to their locales and frames of cultural reference, and the new ecosystems that are developing on account of this. Can you speak to this a bit more about your use of the evolving “visual vernacular” of youth, popular, and digital culture?
I do feel like my work speaks from within the neodiasporic position; I’m not quite anywhere, which is sometimes very scary. There is a sense of growing up between worlds, between timelines, between cultural “homes” that are often imagined, archived, or mediated. As a child of Ivorian and Caribbean heritage growing up in Paris, I’ve always felt that identity isn’t something inherited whole, but something tumultuous and assembled — sometimes frantically, sometimes ritualistically — from fragments. That fragmentation is a recurring logic in my practice. My use of “visual vernacular” is just a fancy way of saying that I’m chronically online! It stems from using the internet as a diary from a very young age.
Congratulations on being the inaugural Tate Modern Infinities Commission. With reference to your practice’s investigation of museums‘ colonial spectres, can you talk a bit about what it was like to prepare work for this context?
Preparing work for the Tate Modern felt like entering a space haunted by both institutional weight and colonial legacy. My practice often engages with the afterlives of empire, with how spectacle and erasure are encoded in both digital and physical architectures. So to be invited into a museum, an institution historically shaped by colonial extraction, was interesting. It was not my first time though; I shot my first film, Collective Amnesia: In Memory of Logobi (2018–2022), at the Museum of Immigration. I’ve always been intrigued by the tension between artists and institutions, the way we’re often both seduced by and in conflict with these spaces. There’s this paradox where institutions want the energy, critique, and cultural capital that comes with inviting artists from historically marginalised backgrounds, but they’re often unequipped.
Your Tate Modern commission is called In a perpetual remix where is my own song? Can you talk about this choice of title?
It speaks to the exhaustion of being endlessly sampled — visually, culturally, emotionally — without ever getting to author your own melody. In this age of accelerated remixing, of algorithm-fed aesthetics, I wondered: where does my own rhythm sit? Who gets to have a “song” in the noise? The question is personal, but also structural; it’s about authorship, and the struggle to locate oneself in a fragmented world.
The commission highlights the shared technical language of DJing, experimental writing, cosmetic surgery procedures, and digital image making. Abounding with ruptures, repetitions, cut and sliced rhythms, and a buoyant freneticism, the work is an enthralling meditation on contemporary beauty standards in the age of the internet. What drew you to interrogate this subject?
It came from living inside it. As a Black woman navigating the creative industries, nightlife, and social media, I became hyper-aware of the pressure to sculpt yourself literally and metaphorically into something “palatable,” “hyper-visible,” “sexy,” “current.” The tools of DJing — cutting, looping, remixing — started to feel uncannily close to the tools of digital editing and cosmetic surgery. I wanted to explore how beauty becomes a kind of software update, how bodies become timelines to edit. But also how those same tools can be used to glitch the system and to reclaim narrative space.
The commission blends together footage you shot yourself — scenes evocative of memories from your childhood, strip clubs, DJ sets, and post-surgery recovery — alongside found footage from memes and cartoons, and historical artworks. One of these references is a nineteenth-century print of Sarah Baartman, the South African Khoikhoi woman brought to London in 1810 and derogatorily paraded around the UK and Ireland as a paid attraction. What drew you to Sarah in particular? What are the parallels you see between her and the fetishisation of Black and cosmetically altered female bodies today?
Sarah Baartman haunts the Western image economy. Her story is foundational. When I see the rise of BBL aesthetics or the viral obsession with hyper-curated femininity — often extracted from Blackness and sold back to us — I see echoes of that legacy. I knew we were kind of witnessing something peculiar when a physique that is originally attributed to African women ended up being sold and advertised to us as something achievable only via capital. My work is more about tracing the long lineage of spectacle, and asking how we might interrupt or reframe it.
The sound element of the commission features a sample of Squarepusher’s ‘A Journey to Reedham – 7am Mix’ (1997). Why did you pick this song? Were there any other tracks or DJs of particular influence to you when working upon the commission?
I’ve always loved that track — it’s anxious but beautiful, full of emotional glitches. That energy mirrored what I wanted in the piece: something unstable, yearning, excessive. This track really reminds me of all the anime’s opening and closing themes, something that feels both conclusive and adventurous. Also, A Journey to Reedham contains samples of James Brown’s ‘Soul Pride’ — I was always impressed and curious about the use of the sample of this iconic drum break. That transformation feels symbolic: the raw power of Black sonic tradition refracted through layers of British digital anxiety. It really embodied the journey and energy of the installation beautifully.
I wanted to focus on your film Collective Amnesia: In Memory of Logobi (2022). It is a gorgeous celebration of tradition and communal remembrance through the lens of folk dance — the way inscribed and shared movement reverberates across public space, geographies, and diasporic communities. Could you talk a bit more about this, with particular reference to the manner in which such dance movements become politicised?
Dance is archive. It holds memories that language can’t express. Logobi is often dismissed as a “hype” dance, but it’s so much more; it’s a trace of working-class resistance and of joy under constraint. In Collective Amnesia, I wanted to treat these movements as serious — as sacred. When the state criminalises youth gatherings, bans music genres, or polices Black bodies in motion, those dances become politically charged even if they weren’t intended to be. They become declarations of life.
Collective Amnesia also featured in your first solo presentation at Tramway in Glasgow: Gentle Battle (2022), a furtherance of your interrogation of trauma responses, and truculence as a mechanism of self-protection. The desire to mobilise some of these traumas inherent to your heritage, to weave collective memories related to these movements and issues, undercuts your work. Can you speak a bit more about this drive and the significance of doing so?
I think this drive also comes from me engaging in therapy. My therapist would often say that, as we grow older, we build our own inner military systems — our own weapons of mass destruction and self-defence techniques. I don’t know why, but for a few sessions we discussed my mental health like a tactic map. I’m interested in the ways aggression and opacity can be forms of care. Gentle Battle was about that: how bodies carry memory somatically, and how performance becomes a site of resistance and repair. We’re often expected to tell trauma neatly, narratively, redemptively. But I’m more drawn to mess, fragments, and echoes. Mobilising these histories is about acknowledging their persistence and creating spaces where they can reverberate without needing to resolve.
Gentle Battle featured the work War! Club! Action!, an ode to Coupé Décalé music and its originator, Douk Saga. The influence of the musical genre and its affiliate club culture is evident in your work’s maximalist tendencies; its arising from the rubble of the civil war in the Ivory Coast exemplifies the significance of sociocultural happenings to your practice. Can you speak a bit more about this work?
Douk Saga invented a genre that was about style, joy, and showing out, but he did it in the middle of a civil war! That contradiction has always stayed with me. There is this old saying, “You don’t need to look like what you’re going through.” Douk Saga and the whole first wave of Coupé Décalé had a dandy flair, always neat and dapper in Yohji Yamamoto, John Galliano, etcetera, which was, yes, quite uncanny in a time of war.
Coupé Décalé is both escape and testimony. It’s a declaration that life continues, even in rubble. War! Club! Action! tried to capture that spirit: the club as battlefield, the dancer as soldier, the outfit as armour. For me, protest doesn’t always look solemn. Sometimes it looks like glitter, or a gun finger in the air. And sometimes using the most hedonistic way to convey the most complex political ideas is the only way.
One of the key threads throughout your work is the investigation of alternative temporalities. In 2025, with all of the surreal and tragic occurrences playing out across the global stage, such practices of fabulation and world-building are particularly poignant. Is there an alternative temporality you’d like to see actualised within our current climate?
Easier said than done, but I’d truly like to see us embrace slowness and glitch, two temporalities that resist the extractive logic of productivity.
In a perpetual remix where is my own song? is on view at Tate Modern through 28 August, 2025.
Tate Modern Lates, in collaboration with Warp Records and Christelle Oyiri, Thursday 28th August, 18.00–22.00. Free entry.
