Infinities Commission: Christelle Oyiri @ Tate Modern

In a Perpetual Remix Where is My Own Song? (2025) © Tate

As the recipient of the first annual Infinities Commission from Tate, Christelle Oyiri’s work In a Perpetual Remix Where is My Own Song? is a monumental piece, but one with a minute attention to its message. The multimedia installation fills one of Tate’s enormous concrete Tanks with rushes of techno sound and light, bringing six bronze statuettes at its centre to life.

The Infinities Commission, Tate’s new initiative to mark 25 years of hosting the best of contemporary art in their Bankside hub, is aimed at celebrating those at the cutting edge of artistic expression, using equally cutting edge media to do so. According to Tate Modern Director Karin Hindsbo, the commission is “designed to stretch the limits of what visual art can offer.” This year’s commissioning body included composer Brian Eno, critic and curator Oulimata Gueye, artist Anne Imhof, Art Director Andrea Lissoni, and, perhaps most importantly in relation to Oyiri’s piece (a fact we’ll return to), curator and writer Legacy Russell.

Walking up to the Tank, you can hear the patchwork of EDM samples before seeing it. It is only once you enter, the concrete path opening out into a vast grey cylinder, that you see the source of the noise: six large sound monitors, cones staring directly at you as you enter, as if in some sort of cultish ritual, pushing chaotic sound waves all across the room. Atop each is a bronze statuette; one of a black woman, close in style to the now infamous statues of Thomas J. Price, two more of the same—except one with exaggerated curves and the other with devil’s horns and tail—and in between them, three statues that seem to resemble a glitch, or a transition—somewhat close to the Elisabeth’s final transformation at the end of The Substance (2024).

In a Perpetual Remix Where is My Own Song? (2025) © Tate

What is evoked here is somewhat similar to Fargeat’s film, but in a different social context. For the first half of Oyiri’s show, a film, projected behind the statuettes, provides some explanation for the meaning behind them, all the while turning them into dark silhouettes. The film is a montage of historical, often racist inquiries into the black female form, and the various stereotypes that come out of it. Moving forward in time, we see the way that the black female form has been variously sexualised, ignored (crossing paths with Price’s sculptures, in this way), and become a plain for modification and remodelling along societal beauty standards. With statues now garnering a new light, Oyiri quickly breaks it down again by descending them into a light show, accompanied by a sprawling EDM track, cutting the statues up under various coloured lights.

This latter half is not some empty climax to the piece, however; Oyiri, a DJ as well as an artist, likens the construction of dance music to the construction of the black female body. “We have to sample to survive,” Oyiri explains, referring to the pressure on women to keep up with beauty standards, sometimes resorting to surgery, in order to be seen—the same way that DJs use sampling to play to their audiences. And, just like with the repeated drum breaks at the root of the disc-jockey tradition, Oyiri’s historical montage film shows us that this goes around in circles throughout time, “just like the menstrual cycle.”

But where is the solace here? Where in this exploration of history repeating is the “limitless experimentation of contemporary art” defining the commissioning body’s agenda? The answer lies in these interstitial sculptures; forming busts rather than full-body statuettes, they represent, according to Oyiri, the body “in transition.” Speaking directly to Legacy Russell’s extensive work on Glitch Feminism, Oyiri pinpoints exactly where the wholeness of the female form under an oppressive gaze fights back: the computer glitch. Russell sees the translation of bodies into digital texts as reductive, often along gender, sexual or racial lines. The power of the glitch, the struggle to define exactly what we are looking at in the intricately sculpted entanglement of shapes that Oyiri presents to us, is what emancipates us from this digital prison. Too often, Russell claims, the digital world is seen as other; in truth, this belief can have drastic consequences in the real world, such as social media, which Oyiri presents in her film as perpetuating the issues at hand. The glitch not only reminds us of the true futility of digital images, but reveals the baselessness of our gaze, a constructed image that can be taken away as quickly as it is provided; as quickly as Oyiri sculptures flash in and out of the shadows of her lightshow.

In an ever digitised world, the question Oyiri poses in the title of her installation is one more and more of us are asking ourselves. It is here we can find the reasons why Oyiri was chosen to inaugurate this commission, kicking off what is hopefully years of contemporary art celebration with a bang.

Infinities Commission: Christelle Oyiri: In a perpetual remix where is my own song? is free to view at Tate Modern until 25th June. For more info visit the exhibition page.