“When folks ask what I do with my artwork apply—am I a painter? a efficiency artist?—one of the best clarification is that I’m a transformer,” Selma Selman stated when requested to explain her work. Certainly, the 33-year-old’s apply spans portray, efficiency, set up, and movie, however central to all the things is the act of transformation: of supplies, social constructs, cultural signifiers, and, most frequently, combos thereof.
Born in Bihać, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and of Romani origin, Selman at the moment divides her time between her hometown and Amsterdam, New York, and Washington, D.C. Her biography being integral to her work, household histories function closely, together with the involvement of members of the family in her performances. Lots of her works, for instance, function scrap steel: her household owns a scrapyard, and she or he grew up gathering and promoting scrap steel along with her father and brothers. Just lately, she spent two years understanding a unhazardous methodology to extract gold from motherboards; then, in a sequence of performances titled Motherboards (2023–ongoing), she invited her brothers and father to assist her carry out the method in entrance of an viewers. After one such efficiency in Hamburg, she had sufficient of the valuable materials to make Motherboards (A Golden Nail), 2023, a gold-covered nail hammered right into a wall.
Whereas her work is rooted within the private, the power of Selman’s artwork owes as a lot to its therapy and subversion of recognizable symbols. “I wouldn’t use the phrase ‘common,’ however [the works] turn into planetary,” she stated. “They may very well be understood—linked—by many different folks.” In Selman’s world, luxurious automobiles turn into scrap steel. Digital waste turns into gold. Stigmatized labor turns into prestigious.
View of the efficiency Motherboards, 2023, at Gropius Bau, Berlin.
Photograph Eike Walkenhorst
In a solo exhibition at Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt that runs by September 15, Selman is displaying, amongst different works, her latest movie, Crossing the Blue Bridge (2024), which frames a site-specific efficiency centered on her mom’s recollections of the Bosnian Battle. Works from a sequence of drawings titled “Superpositional Intersectionalism” (2023), in the meantime, have been proven in a 2023 exhibition at Berlin’s Gropius Bau and in one other earlier this 12 months at Röda Sten Konsthall in Gothenburg, Sweden. One drawing within the sequence, Ophelia’s Awakening, shares a title with a portray protecting a whole Lotus automobile she accomplished earlier this 12 months, with each items exploring a kinship with Shakespeare’s traditional. “I really feel a connection to Ophelia being pressured to marry somebody,” Selman stated. “My father needed me to marry somebody, however I managed [to escape that]. I’m lacking the purpose of Ophelia taking life into her personal fingers, so I’m making an attempt to rewrite it—she’s an incredible image that may be reused for the resistance.”
Addressing intersectional oppressions confronted by peoples all over the world, Selman’s work resonates in many alternative contexts, with pointed transformations at its core. Very like the precision wanted to dismantle a automobile into useful sections of scrap steel, Selman makes it clear that nothing in her work is incidental or unintended: “If I’ve one thing to say, I’m going to say it,” she stated. “If I don’t, I shut the fuck up. I don’t waste my phrases.”