A question of listening

Selma 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.

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).
Selman’s expe­ri­ence as a woman, and her survival expe­ri­ences in general are also tied to other members of her family – to her father, brother, and cousins – working for her expres­sion and success.