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.

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.

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.

Selma Selman: Flowers of Life, exhibition view, © Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt 2024, Photo: Norbert Miguletz
Selma Selman: Flowers of Life, detail, © Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt 2024, Photo: Norbert Miguletz

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).

Selma Selman, A Pink Room of Her Own, Installation, Performance, 3D Print, 2020, image via selmanselma.com

Selma Selman: Flowers of Life, exhibition view, © Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt 2024, Photo: Norbert Miguletz

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.

It all starts with listening

The current exhibition at SCHIRN, entitled “Flowers of Life”, presents her multi-layered work and growing visibility as a Roma woman artist. Through her drawings, video works, installation pieces and live performances, we can observe the prevailing decoloniality tendency in the arts, by which all engagement with minorities and colonies begins with listening. Many of the western interventions simply imagine liberation and freedom as a perfect mirroring of what they know. When we listen, however, we recognise that many of the insurgent movements actually aim to access space, with many forging strategies not to withdraw from, but to better engage in citizenship. Many fight to access mainstream infrastructure, or seek to establish visibility, or have movements for alternative nationhood, even a territory which they can call their own.

She is “the most dangerous woman in the world” (self-declared in 2020), but also one with a touching vulnerability, and with a burning desire to instil justice in all souls, inviting all of us to listen and connect.

SELMA SELMAN. FLOWERS OF LIFE

JUNE 20 – SEPTEMBER 15, 2024

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