Christelle Oyiri
October 13 - December 12, 2025 Champ Lacombe London
Christelle Oyiri
October 13 —December 12, 2025
Champ Lacombe London
Artist, producer, and DJ (under the pseudonym CRYSTALLMESS), Christelle Oyiri (b.1992) works across multiple disciplines – from music, film to performance and installation. Oyiri has described her work as focusing on ‘the things that lie between the lines’, including lost mythologies, subcultures, and diasporic histories. This exhibition focuses specifically on those subcultures. An unspoken visual lexicon - be it punk, goth, rave, emo, hip-hop, subcultures defy the normative and masquerade against the grain with each of them possessing a distinct visual lexicon, fostering and building a sense of community over.
First exhibited at the MMK Frankfurt in 2024, sculptures, reminiscent of tables used in school cafeterias, are superimposed with ghosts of adolescent yearnings. The images are both found footage, and from Oyiri’s personal archive, transforming the tables into altars of nostalgia. Subcultures, now fractured by the velocity of digital life, have always been influential to Oyiri. This exhibition comes at an especially pivotal time when subcultures have been replaced by trends that collapse into a fluid matrix of homogeneity, constantly replaced by another, and detached from any historic or ideological grounding, producing a flattened aesthetic synonymity.
While works in the upstairs gallery echo allure and performativity, downstairs, the exhibition pivots to revealing a tender confession, punctuated by previously unseen teenage diary entries, drawing into focus the inherent contradiction faced throughout the development of identity Oyiri has staged installations, performances and events around the world, including most recently at TATE MODERN, as part of the inaugural Infinities Commission, at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, Haus der Kunst in Munich, MMK in Frankfurt, Tramway in Glasgow and the Serpentine Gallery in London, and has an upcoming exhibition at the Zachęta Museum in Warsaw.
