Selma SELMAN

Selma Selman (b. 1991) is one of the youngest and most exciting flag-bearers of a long tradition of critical and political art from the ex-Yugoslav area. Working across performance, video, photography, drawing, and painting, her practice revolves around questions of labour and economy—especially through the recycling and use of scrap metal, a reference to the way her family has supported itself for generations. In many performances, she destroys metal goods—whole cars or household items—with an axe to harvest their valuable content. She then systematically recycles these dismantled parts by painting on them, questioning how society assigns value to material objects and to labour, and how we relate to both. Her paintings on scrap metal form a personal visual diary composed of often-symbolic self-portraits, portraits of her family, impressions of everyday life in Bosnia, harsh and ironic reflections on her position in the whirlpool of global capitalism, sensitive and eerie text-based confessions, disquieting depictions of female body parts, and art-historical references that have shaped her. By repurposing materials from scrap yards, Selman also highlights ecological and geopolitical issues while addressing systemic discrimination, social divisions, and the struggles of marginalised communities—particularly in resisting sexism, patriarchy, and racism. Her work intertwines these themes with her own lived experiences, creating memorials that are as personal as they are political. Painting on Mercedes-Benz car hoods—symbols of wealth and social status in Bosnia—has become one of Selman’s most characteristic gestures. In the work Painting on Metal (2019–2020), she explores a dissonance in her identity: considered too light-skinned by her own community and too dark-skinned for white Western Europeans, a tension rendered by two black and white female silhouettes on the hood. She turns this duality into a transformative force, depicting hair and limbs that elongate and melt into each other, prefiguring a new, hybrid creature. These imaginary female bodies are not only a visual formulation of her personal situation; they are also steps toward a plasticity of the self that Selman has developed as an artistic strategy. Selma Selman is based between Amsterdam, New York, and Bihać. She earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts in 2014 from the Department of Painting at Banja Luka University, and in 2018 received an MFA in Transmedia, Visual and Performing Arts from Syracuse University, New York. She is the founder of “Get The Heck To School,” an organisation that empowers Romani girls worldwide who face ostracisation and live in poverty. She was a resident at the Rijksakademie from 2021 to 2023.