Salim Bayri has taken the waiting of the citizen as his subject for his second solo exhibition at Galerie van Gelder. He believes that with government agencies you often can’t make head or tail out of it. You have to fill out forms, take numbers and wait endlessly for your turn. Then time is made for an interview or the assessment of an application, the results of which take months. “Everywhere we are expected to wait, often with the message that everything will be fine,” he says.
In the exhibition ‘Civil’ the visitor has to draw a number and wait in the front room of the gallery until the drawn number appears on a screen. In a corner there is a coffee machine that does not work.
Salim knows the “panic that then arises over something essentially small”. In such a situation, coffee or tea is so important that those waiting raise the alarm and expect an employee to start the machine again.
In the back room, Salim Bayri has followed an urgent advice from the Dutch government to be self-sufficient for 72 hours. On the wall hang inventories of places, people and things he knows.
In various corners of the gallery you will find ‘dust corners’, each collecting dust with an outstretched hand. Accompanying texts on the wall explain the importance of dust that accumulates in corners of houses, both inside and outside on the street. Salim Bayri has now provided dozens of corners of facades and window frames in Amsterdam with a 'dust corner'. Municipal cleaning crews are still ignoring these.
Salim Bayri (1992) studied at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam from 2019-2021. In both 2019 and 2021 he received an Artfacts Performance Award and in 2022 he won the De Volkskrant Visual Arts Prize. He recently exhibited at Moezeum in Rotterdam and was nominated for the Future Generation Art Prize 2024, Pinchuk Art Center, Kyiv, Ukraine.