CRIMES AS CRIMES
Intervention in public space with Salim Bayri︎
Bozar︎ - Brussels
2024
Bozar invited five artists to create artworks visible in Augmented Reality (AR) on smartphones, floating around the Mont des Arts neighbourhood. Visitors can discover eight artworks inspired by the Surrealists’ practices, on the façades of buildings in and around Bozar’s building.
All artworks are text-based, like animated poems, reminding us of the importance of words and manifesto-writing for the historical surrealist artists in Belgium and across Europe.
Ghita Skali and Salim Bayri’s interventions in the Central Station’s main square are a comment on the trickery, demagogy and manipulation of words in political contexts. Speaking up about ongoing horrors, and placed in this particular gathering site where protests happen denouncing it, this work is in support of protesters. The focus is on word play; when it is a good time and when it is not for it. Surrealists played with words just like oppressors and politicians, although with different power and harm.
In this work, they wanted to point at the weaponization of words by destructive regimes and political manipulations.
From the watercourse to the beach
From the billabong to the sea
From the creek to the saltwater
From the waterfall to the ocean
From the canal to the nautical
From the river to the flow
From the wave to the wave
