Photo: Fabian Landewee
Selma Selman, born in 1991, is an artist and activist from Bihać in Bosnia and Herzegovina with Roma origin, currently living in Amsterdam.
Through performance, video installation, photography, and painting, her work draws from her own and her family's experiences—yet always balancing the realities of biography with speculative and poetic elements. Such as in Selma Selman's pivotal work "Mercedes Matrix" (2019), where she subtly comments on the value-making processes in the arts. The piece is a video documentation of Selman and her family publicly dismantling a Mercedes-Benz, accompanied by a piano track by Philip Glass, juxtaposing the performance of actual daily labor with the virtuosity of artistic expression.
Influenced by the aftermath of the Yugoslav Wars (1991-2001) and the multifaceted challenges women face in today's society, she transforms specific objects in order to highlight oppressive power structures and in the pursuit of contemporary political resistance. Selman is the founder and visionary of "Get The Heck To School," an organization dedicated to empowering Roma girls worldwide who face societal ostracization and poverty.
Selman's recent solo exhibitions took place at the Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt (2024); Röda Sten Konsthall, Gothenburg (2024); and Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin (2023). Her work was also included in documenta fifteen, Kassel (2022), and Manifesta 14, Pristina (2022).
Language: English
Price: 80 SEK (free admission for students)
Tickets: www.stadsmissionen.se/motesplats-mariatorget/kalendarium
World in My Eyes – An Artist Lecture Series
All the islands in the ocean
All the heavens in the motion
Let me show you the world in my eyes
// Depeche Mode (1990)
In its second season, the artist talk series World in My Eyes presents Jonathas de Andrade, Selma Selman, Salman Toor, and Cecilia Vicuña. Each artist contributes to both the discursive and formal hybridity of contemporary art at a moment of acute geopolitical volatility and increasing polarization.
Launched in 2023, World in My Eyes is an artist lecture series in Stockholm presented through a collaboration between Konstfack University of Arts, Crafts and Design; Moderna Museet; and the Royal Institute of Art and hosted by Mötesplats Mariatorget. Its title drawn from the eponymous 1990s electronic music hit by English band Depeche Mode, the series aims to present artistic perspectives from a wide range of media that are changing the relationship between material processes and socio-political imagination.