ABN AMRO Art Award: Selma Selman

THE MOST DANGEROUS WOMAN IN THE WORLD

Selma Selman is an artist and activist. Coming from a family of scrap metal dealers, she has a keen awareness of the importance of recycling and transformation. This understanding is the foundation of her multidisciplinary oeuvre. Selman once described herself as “the most dangerous woman in the world.” In high-intensity performances, she expresses her anger at existing power relations and the urge to reverse them. However, her self-described persona as “the most dangerous woman” is also a reference to the prejudice toward people from the Roma community, such as Selman herself. She grew up in this community during and after the Bosnian War, and her personal experiences therein are central to her work. Thus, she frequently poses questions about stereotypes, traditional gender roles, and discrimination, transforming her experiences of these phenomena in a way that encourages reflection on society’s power structures.

SLEEPING GUARDS

Sleeping Guards features the installation Motherboards, a sculpture made from remnants of the aforementioned performance. The exhibition also features three miniature gold objects, including Motherboards (A Golden Nail) and the newly created Motherboards (Spoon), which are gilded with the gold extracted from the motherboards of previous performances. Another installation features giant mechanical grapples—a familiar item in Selman’s family’s scrap metal business—which she transforms into ‘living’ flowers: kinetic sculptures that open and close. In the film Crossing the Blue Bridge, her mother’s traumatic experiences of the Bosnian War are transformed into a symbol of activism and feminism that merges memory, history, and mythology. The exhibition is permeated by the fragrance The Most Dangerous Woman in the World, created by the artist in collaboration with scent designers, and also includes a new series of drawings in which female figures metamorphose into hybrid beings, suggesting the artist’s personal exploration of fluid identities.

Selman draws links between opposing states and qualities: dream and reality, aggression and vulnerability. This can be observed, for instance, in the ambiguous title Sleeping Guards, which could also include the notion of “sleep guardians”—invisible forces that watch over Selman’s alternately strategic, activism-oriented, and emotionally resonant work.