A city split between afterlife and afterparty: in Berlin, Christelle Oyiri’s simultaneous exhibitions stage a double séance. “Heaven’s worth, Hell on earth” and "Dead God Flow" form a resonant system where devotion meets sub-bass, and memory is engineered in alloy and light.

At Buchholz, the gallery is almost ascetic: matte cassettes gleam like votive tablets; a Bang & Olufsen altar hums with the calm of a designer chapel; a pyramid rises from a pedestal, its capstone a cut of icy acrylic encasing a suspended skull. Oyiri’s own text sets the register: “Hell is so ordinary: / a body on the verge of collapse, / a mirror that won’t forgive.” The works metabolize that ordinariness into ritual hardware. The cast tapes—engraved with skulls and the syntax of Memphis rap—operate as both reliquary and weaponized nostalgia. “Heaven’s worth / is the tape you found in an attic / buried in static,” she writes, and the room listens for the hiss.

This is an anthropology of formats. The cassette becomes a minor monument, a portable tomb for voices that once rattled car doors. Aluminum reads as “Kemet, dreamt in aluminum,” a sly alloy of African antiquity and American futurity. Oyiri’s pyramid—its acrylic apex milky with spectral refraction—embodies the exhibition’s central wager: that paradise and purgatory aren’t opposite coordinates, but two modes of compression. “How heavy are memories when casted in metal to survive?” The answer: heavy enough to pull the hereafter down into the showroom.

Across the city at CANK, Dead God Flow widens the frame. The installation revolves around Hauntology of an OG, a new film developed with photographer Neva Wireko during fieldwork in Memphis—another city named for the Nile, another pyramid raised in the name of commerce and myth. Oyiri’s narration threads “a lineage of grandeur and grief,” mapping the Memphis Pyramid against Giza while treating the city’s rap as “an architecture of sound.”  The film moves past the touristic sublime toward the infrastructural: churches, parking lots, the sites where civic dreams combust. It recalls, too, a pulsing proposition from the artist: “death is not an ending but a loop, a broken god’s beat still pulsing.”

Loop and monument: these are Oyiri’s twinned materials. In Dead God Flow the loop is literal—Princess Loko’s sampled cadence returns like incense—and spatial, as the environment reroutes viewers through fog, LEDs, and a slanted, pyramidic stage. The monument is not only the Memphis pyramid, “a mirror to Giza,” but the temporary monument of the club: a structure that holds a crowd long enough for belief to rise, then dissolves by dawn.  The exhibition shares space with Foundations, a series by CEL that prototypes new ecologies for Black art and nightlife—another architecture for survival.

Taken together, the Berlin diptych insists on theology without obedience. Oyiri’s objects and videos are devotional not to doctrine but to transmission. They ask: what if sanctity lives in formats, in the compressions and distortions through which a voice persists? The acrylic skull in Buchholz refracts every light source into soft glitches; at LAS, the camera reads smoke like scripture. Both spaces stage belief as fabrication—“America, the precious counterfeit twin”—yet they give counterfeits a complicated dignity, the way a bootleg CD or a YouTube rip can carry more life than the remastered original.

Oyiri’s sharpest move is to torque pathos into circuitry. Her question—“What is holiness without a lick of transgression?”—grounds a politics of form. The cassette’s working-class plasticity, the hi-fi fetish object, the pyramid-as-shopping-mall: each becomes a conduit for Black sonic futurism, not as metaphor but as infrastructure. In a year when cultural institutions rehearse sanctimony with predictable choreography, Oyiri builds shrines to the leak, the sample, the glitch. Paradise, in this cosmology, isn’t the absence of fire. It’s built “in the threat of fire,” then cut to the beat and played back loud enough to crack the plaster.

Both shows leave you with a simple, destabilizing sense: heaven and hell are co-authored by speakers and stones. Berlin becomes a mixing desk. The loop goes on.

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I was raised under crucifixes
where every whisper was measured against eternity
I learned early on that the most dangerous prayer
was the one said backwards

Hell is so ordinary:
a body on the verge of collapse,
a mirror that won’t forgive,
desire stretched across every surface

Heaven’s worth
is the tape you found in an attic
buried in static,
hissing like a secret you were not meant to keep

Kemet, dreamt in aluminum
a monument half-remembered, half-invented,
America, the precious counterfeit twin
Fantasy and fracture

This work gathers both paradise and purgatory,
How heavy are memories when casted in metal to survive ?
What is holiness without a lick of transgression ?
What is paradise if not built in the threat of fire ?­

C.O.