Comfort and VisionComfort and Vision

The selected videos were sent in from Brazil, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain, Switzerland, Ukraine and the UK. Three works were produced by Sandberg Instituut students in a workshop given by Salim Bayri and artist and designer Juliette Lizotte.

The screening will be introduced by Julia van Mourik (director of The One Minutes Foundation), Salim Bayri and Juliette Lizotte and will be followed by a performance 'Snap' by Leesa and a video_ Images I need to take out of my head_ by Salim Bayri. The participating artists will be (virtually) present. Open discussion with the public is encouraged. Please register for free to participate!

"Home is not where you are born; home is where all your attempts to escape cease." - Naguib Mahfouz

Salim Bayri: "One feels comfortable at home when everything in it becomes invisible. When nothing feels out of place or strange. Things are where you leave them, water will come out of the tap and you can walk to your bed with your eyes closed. Comfort is where the least unpredictable things happen. Does that make our senses lazy?"

Perhaps 2020, the year in which humanity spent the most time at home, has made us mould differently to our idea of comfort: inseparable couples now can't even look at each other and the ugly painting your mother gave you now feels sweeter than ever. This upset notion of comfort changes the perception of what's strange, familiar, irritating or soothing. So how does this new definition of comfort affect what we see?

Salim Bayri is a visual artist, born and raised in Casablanca and based in Amsterdam. While making sand sculptures, Bayri hangs out in obsolete online chatrooms where strangeness, blasphemy, and pulling each other's leg are common practice. As a polyglot, he is able to enter many of the different rooms where diasporas gather. His alter ego 'Sad Ali', short for Sad Alien, reflects this approach. Sad Ali is a silent character with a translucent body - he explores but is not a participant. Floating between scenes he is granted a fluidity that cannot be pinned down.

In his studio, Bayri is developing a 'Hadra Collider': a conceptual device, whose name he coined in reference to the CERN particle accelerator, to imagine a search for the particle X in language. It works by accelerating tongues and making words hit each other to help answer questions of racism, social injustice and cultural violence.

Sophie Bates, Anna Bierler, Andrea Bordoli, Jaume Clotet, Paula Garcia Sans, Levi van Gelder, Yara Greuter, Thi Hoai Le, Klaas Koetje, Makis Kyriakopoulos, Lee Mc Donald, Sara Milio, Snow Sheng Jie, Kevin Siwoff, Lisa Smithson, Katharina Sook Wilting, Alix Stria, Theo Tajes, Mariusz Wirski, Jack Wormell and Yuri Yefanov.

Comfort and Vision was made possible by Pictoright Fund, Amsterdam Fund for the Arts and the Sandberg Instituut.

The One Minutes Foundation produces and distributes one-minute videos from an artistic point of view, offering an international stage for people to create, engage and connect. The One Minutes is active at the forefront of international contemporary art, as well as in education and welfare. It has exhibited at Power Station of Art (China), the National Gallery in Reykjavík (Iceland) and Whitney Museum of American Art in New York (USA), among other venues. Every two months, The One Minutes Foundation puts out a new series of 60-second films that investigate how we perceive and engage with the moving image. Museums and cultural organisations around the world subscribe to the series. Send in your videos and participate in the project!