Christelle Oyiri’s VENOM VOYAGE features a fictitious travel agent’s booth that comes fully equipped with a laser engraved designer leather chair; six plexiglass prints of aggressive marketing slogans centred around travel, which she overlays with family photos; toxic green seashells filled with epoxy resin and a plexiglass VENOM VOYAGE logo. The immersive installation fluctuates between luxury and dystopian through branding, cartoonish elements and a confrontation of unsettling histories.

The booth confronts the poisoning of Oyiri's native Martinique and Guadeloupe with chlordecone, a chemical used in intensive agriculture until 1993 despite being banned in the US in 1976, whose effects are still felt today. “I spent my childhood vacations in Guadeloupe, a place with pristine beaches and a luxurious sense of nature,” Oyiri reminisces. “When I went back as an adult, I discovered its layers of political history. I began looking at memories of my vacations through a new veil of information.”

Fuelled by her reading of political philosopher Frantz Fanon and H.E. Sawyer’s I am the Dark Tourist, VENOM VOYAGE confronts Oyiri’s new awareness through a lens of tourism, questioning the realities of utopian holiday destinations and the distorted imaginary of them by conflating a travel agency with a villain’s headquarters. Glossy souvenirs, green walls that elicit both the tropical and sickly and text featuring militant marketing phrases make the booth a Gesamtkunstwerk, a total work of art that sees Oyiri heavily intertwining delusion and reality into a twilight zone where truth is traded for irony and messaging aims to unsettle.

VENOM VOYAGE, Brechtian in its awareness, includes some of the qualities of the German playwright’s Epic theatre, in which certain techniques serve to remind the audience that they are in fact watching a play, thus provoking them into social activation. In this case, the production is merely a production rather than reality. Oyiri’s work provides the viewer with a new awareness of the psychological and physical impact of colonialism (driven by the pursuit of profit and leisure society) framed through sentiment, satire and a cheekiness that suggests the artist is not interested in delivering a moral lesson.

Within VENOM VOYAGE, the slimy undercurrent within the promise of tourism meets the artist’s own childhood memories of adventure and family fun in the French Caribbean. Oyiri reconciles these two views, both distant from reality and full of contradictions that the booth seeks to lay bare.