ART-PRESENTATION: Selma Selman
Selma Selman’s artistic process echoes the older tradition of a polymath artist ethically synthesizing technological and ecological tools to resolve the conflicts typical for social engagement. Repeatedly evoking the motif of scrap metal collection and recycling, Selman invites us to question the ways in which we assign value to objects, labor, and human beings.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Selma Selman’s Archive
Working across media, Selma Selman’s oeuvre reflects the complexities of her identity as the permanent “Other” being a Roma, an immigrant, and a woman. The series of works exhibited at the National Gallery of Bosnia and Herzegovina is particularly inspired by the labor of the Roma community, including her own family. “Mercedes Matrix” (2020): Due to the ongoing economic crises of Bosnia-Herzegovina, it is incredibly difficult to organize an adequate income, especially for Roma people due to the lack of education and discrimination – they live without government help. This integration of art labor and her family’s labor for survival extends into further collaborations and it is useful when the value system crashes, like Bosnian economy. In this work, art becomes a tool to question the labor of her family and her labor as an artist. The same acts of labor which are performed are simultaneously executed for my own survival as well as being executed by and for the survival of her family. “No Space“ (2019) is a video work that humorously portrays planetary scale issues that are challenging human societies beyond our current capacity to define them. The video work is a chance to envision a present but unknown definition of a we – or a future we – which we could truly define ourselves as belonging to. In “A Pink Room of Her Own” (2020), Selman is serving as a lens that focuses on the concrete and significant details of her mother’s past, possible and actualized dreams. Selman worked together with her mother, reconstructing the memories of her desired rooms from the childhood that she never experienced. Her mother’s childhood was lost due to child marriage at age 13. Her wish/dream was to have a girl’s room. Selman drew her room according to real and fictive memories of unrealized dreams and then made a 3D print. In Selma Selman’s art works, the ultimate aim is to protect and enable female bodies and enact across-scalar approach to collective self-emancipation of oppressed women. Selman’s search for functional, contemporary political resistance stems from her personal experience with oppression from various directions and in different scales. Selman is also the founder of the organization “Get The Heck To School” which aims to empower Roma girls around the world who have faced social ostracization and poverty.
Photo: Selma Selman, Self Portrait II, 2017, Performance Length: 45 min, Video Documentation Length: 13’00, Photo Dimensions: 150cm x 100cm, 70cm x 50cm acb gallery-Budapest, © Selma Selman, Photo: Tibor Varga Somogyi
Info: Curator: Amila Ramović, National Gallery of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Zelenih beretki 8, Sarajevo, Bosnia & Herzegovina, Duration: 23/7-1/9/2021, Days & Hours: Mon-Sat 10:00-20:00, https://ugbih.ba
