Bodies and technology each diffracting through the other their own frantic symbols. Carnal abstractions and designs.¹

Installation Views (4 images)

At the beginning of Christelle Oyiri’s looping film, titled Perpetual remix, nineteenth-century female bodies fill the screen. Against a sonic backdrop of guttural rumbling, resembling the audio distortions of a blown-out speaker, Sarah Baartman appears: a South African woman brought to Britain in 1810 and exhibited as a living spectacle, advertised to fairground audiences as the “Hottentot Venus.” Derided and fetishised for her body during her lifetime, Baartman, in Oyiri’s words, continues to “haunt the Western image economy,” as echoes of her likeness resurface in cultural artefacts ranging from the nineteenth-century crinoline to Kim Kardashian’s synthetic curves.

Both the crinoline and Kardashian’s surgical assets are technologies of beauty: extensions of the body used to facilitate and define the desirable silhouette according to ever-shifting metrics. In each case, “organic” physicality is augmented through additive structures, remade in the image of the beautiful by splicing horsehair or silicone to living tissue. Now, its cycles of transformation accelerated by the algorithm’s rapacious gaze, the fashioned/ fashionable body remains an assemblage of materials and cultural fragments, including, as Oyiri points out, those isolated and repurposed from Black bodies and aesthetics. The blood-soaked compression garment, worn after BBL surgery, becomes part of a lineage of devices that scaffold and transform the body through impact between flesh and foreign matter.

Selected Works (3 images)

The artist draws on her parallel career as a DJ to approach physical and digital processes of bodily augmentation—isolating an element, editing or manipulating it, recontextualising it into something new—using tools associated with electronic music. Extracting, cutting, splicing, looping; in Perpetual remix, Oyiri demonstrates the ways these strategies are applied to both sound and flesh. In one sequence, hands manipulating a turntable share a split screen with bodily matter being excised, sewn, and slit by gloved fingers, sped up to match the stuttering pace of the footwork accompaniment.

The forms of “remixing” playing out in this footage are mirrored by the film’s structure: snippets of internet video and iPhone clips recorded by the artist are interposed with lush, cinematic sequences to create a collage of visual styles, disparate source tracks woven into a singular arrangement. Pokemon, Blac Chyna, Labi Siffre, and Jean Baudrillard become stems, the clusters of instruments and sounds that make up a song. For Oyiri, identity is “something tumultuous and assembled, sometimes frantically, sometimes ritualistically, from fragments.” Each sampled reference acts as a point of ricochet, a potential catalyst for continuous self-construction.

The bronze sculptures displayed alongside Perpetual remix, showing Oyiri’s body in states of transformation, monumentalize the fluctuations of flesh and self that are traced throughout the film. Their reflective finish is the result of anodization, an industrial process in which the metal’s surface is transformed through electrochemical action. Like digital avatars, the gleaming figures bear the marks of physical customisation: one shows Oyiri with preternaturally toned stomach; another with Pokémon horns and tail. Here, Oyiri uses the physical heft and permanence of bronze to visualize the body in flux, an “evolving, desiring machine, something constantly assembled and transformed.” The lenticular prints displayed on the walls extend this play between flickering instability and fixed surface; as the viewer moves, images shift, dissolve, and are reconstituted. By giving tangible form to the conditions of seeing predicated by the internet—glitching, recombining, fading and reappearing—Oyiri draws attention to the porous membrane between virtual and material experience: bodies and technology each diffracting through the other.

¹ Jean Baudrillard, Ballard’s Crash, 1991