A QUESTION OF LISTENING
Selma Selman creates her poetry of the future from multiple generations of Roma heritage completed with her subjective family story and history from Bihać, Bosnia. Her work shows that any engagement with minorities and the colonized must begin with listening.
By Tímea JunghausSelma Selman does not stop at seeming successes: her wisdom is transgenerational, and she looks towards a future which we perhaps cannot even envisage. She creates her poetry of the future from multiple generations of Roma heritage completed with her subjective family story and history from Bihać, Bosnia. Her work, “Mercedes Matrix”, was a live disassembling of a used Mercedes Benz car, with many parts recycled in her painting series, entitled “Paintings on Metal”.
At SCHIRN, she installs gigantic mobile flower installations which are transformed from used multipronged grab truck arms. The arms come to life as opening and closing flower petals, which appear anthropomorphic, with eyes, some complete with teardrops. The accompanying smell of gasoline heightens the tension between the notion of the fragility of flowers, and the robust metal waste, creating a space for contemplating beauty and at the same time durability, even resilience. Selman’s artistic strategy applies her family’s knowledge about finding beauty and value – in what others consider worthless waste.
The strength and knowledge of generations
Her drawings, “Superpositional Intersectionalism”, connect as well to the Roma awareness about life, the universe and our planetary connectedness. “Tajsa” in Romani language means present, past and future. The language demonstrates a conviction, that humans – as the quantum physics superpositional theory proved – exist in an infinite number of potential times and possibilities. The self-portrait drawings by Selman extend the shape of the human body and present their transgressions.
Selman’s unapologetic feminism takes as its point of departure the strong and resilient character of her mother, and through her, gives voice and visibility to other Bosnian women –positions, then transmitting the power of generations to fuel the activism of Selman. Love and sensuality inhabited her first works dedicated to her mother. When her mother first took Selman to the sea, she created a video work (“SALTWATER AT 47”, 2015-2016) of her first encounter with the Adriatic Sea and with the sea in general. Through the three-dimensional modelling of her mother’s unrealised childhood dreams, the artist created a room printed in pink plastic, to realise this dream in the artwork (“A Pink Room of Her Own”, 2020).