Salim Bayri
Salim Bayri (b. Casablanca, 1992; lives and works in Amsterdam) is visual artist and polyglot whose practice spans sculpture, performance, drawing, coding, tech, and the virtual realm.
Salim, as a Moroccan citizen living abroad, is often busy with the question of ‘what to keep and what to discard’. This applies to physical objects, virtual ones, ideas and narratives. Some rotten colonial ideas are ready to be thrown away while others such as Moroccan Darija are to be preserved and revisited.
Salim often thinks about his mother tongue, especially its code-switching particularity where, in the same sentence, various languages can coexist. He looks for plastic and digital gestures that function in that way: switch between modalities, appropriates, disorients yet says something.
Bayri holds a BA in Arts and Design from the Escola Massana (CAT) and a MA in Media, Art, Design and Technology from the Frank Mohr Institute (NL). 2019-21 he was a resident at the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunst (NL); and in 2022 was awarded the Volkskrant Visual Arts Prize and the Charlotte Köhler Prize. His work has been shown in art spaces and institutions such as W139 (Amsterdam), CODA Museum (Apeldoorn), Alyssa Davis Gallery (New York), ADN Gallery (Barcelona), Azkuna Zentroa (Bilbao), GVCC (Casablanca), Hot Wheels (Athens), and La Capella (Barcelona) among others. Bayri is half of the music duo BAZOGA and he is represented by Galerie van Gelder (Amsterdam), but he can often be found hanging out in obsolete online chatrooms where diasporas gather, and where strangeness, blasphemy, and “pulling each other’s legs'' are common practices.