The world’s superfluous elements

Anybody who encoun­tered Selman’s work for the first time at docu­menta 15 will be aware that she paints on car parts, more precisely, on Mercedes and BMW engine hoods. As she herself readily confesses in an inter­view with curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, she can no longer paint on canvas. “Once upon a time I did paint on canvas.” Born in 1991, before studying Art in Banja Luka, Bosnia-Herze­govina, and on the United States’ East Coast, she painted inces­santly and her father, a scrap merchant by trade, acted as her agent. He never kept a picture for more than a few days. “He really is a cata­lyst for my ideas,” Selman continues, “because we used to work at home in our junk­yard together.”

She started using the mate­rial on which her family’s busi­ness is based. “In my village,” she continues, “a Mercedes-Benz repre­sents a symbol of success. (…) But at the same time, I travel to Germany, where I destroy it, and use the parts as painting surface. Various notions of value are in play here. First, the purely symbolic value of the car, in that it repre­sents afflu­ence, then its mate­rial value, and finally its hard-to-define value as art.

For her 2019–20 perfor­mance enti­tled “Mercedes Matrix” the artist had her father and other rela­tions take apart a Mercedes E-class until only its chassis and the engine block remained. This was the first time she first collab­o­rated with her rela­tives. The parts can be reused and it could be the case that this work contains a paradox such as the one about Theseus’ ship: What is left of the Mercedes after all its parts have been disman­tled, sold or used as the raw mate­rials for art?

Recy­cling and upcy­cling. Trans­forming and reusing are exam­ples of old forms of cultural engi­neering, partic­u­larly impor­tant for us these days when we are simul­ta­ne­ously confronted with over­abun­dance and scarcity. However, such tech­nolo­gies have also been prac­tices used in avant-garde art for a long time now. Perhaps every­thing started with the idea of using trash as a mate­rial. Prob­ably the most radical example of this and defi­nitely the first one was Marcel Duchamp, that pioneer of concept art, who declared his finds from flea markets to be ready-mades.

Selman is concerned herself with work and she opens her contin­uing perfor­mance “Moth­er­boards” (2023) by reciting Rudyard Kipling’s “The Secret of the Machines” (1911): “We were taken from the ore-bed (orbed) and the mine, /We were melted in the furnace (frnas) and the pit” In this text, worker and machine meld, and the melting of metals is a symbol of indus­trial labor. Mean­while, Selman’s father and the other performers process elec­tronic scrap (some­thing that is normally disposed of a long way away from Europe). When the piece was orig­i­nally performed at the Gropius Bau in Berlin, a cellist and a DJ provided the accom­pa­nying music, which in turn refer­enced the sound of work – although here some­thing else also takes place. Selman extracts the gold, a mate­rial that recurs regu­larly in her work, from the scrap. At a later point, she will cast a nail from it. For a later perfor­mance she extracts plat­inum from catalytic converters for cars. Kipling’s verses call the indus­trial age to mind and the perfor­mance is based around labor as a small-scale kind of extrac­tion.

Any history of the art of recy­cling would have, to some extent, to be a history of labor. Or, to express it more precisely, a history that explains how new notions of the artist’s work are replacing the old ones. Inci­den­tally, there is another piece by Selman on canvas, Dirt 0, dating from 2021, that is also a ready-made. This piece is the large piece of cloth in which her father carried car parts, only in the white cube it was trans­formed into an abstract, almost gestural painting. Selman’s work revolves around trans­for­ma­tions (turning scrap metal into gold) and around how to help restore some kind of dignity to once stig­ma­tized labor, namely handling the left­overs, the world’s super­fluous elements. However, this is not possible without an artist’s inter­ven­tion, a further trans­for­ma­tion.