The exhibition of the foreign guest of the Jindřich Chalupecký Prize 2024 brings the work of internationally established young artist Selma Selman to the Czech Republic for the first time.
In recent years, Selman has been a fixture on the global contemporary art scene. After studying in Amsterdam and New York, she presented her projects at the most famous international discursive exhibition of contemporary art documenta in Kassel, Germany, and at the travelling exhibition Manifesta. In her works, she refers extensively to the cultural, political and social realities and problematic patterns of behaviour in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the country of her origin, especially in the question of the position of women in society and the relationship to the Roma minority to which the artist's family belongs. She opens up these themes mainly through performances in which she herself appears, often accompanied by other members of her family. In her exhibition projects, the artist uses video recordings of performances to contextualize images or texts hand-painted on various pieces of metal. These are the second artistic element with which the artist has been working for a long time. Thus, an encounter with Selma Selman's works is usually a powerful experience of the authentic and elemental energy that the artist puts into her performances, as well as an excursion into the realities of a world that she has left behind, but to which she constantly relates through her work.
The exhibition at the Moravian Gallery in Brno features video recordings of two performances. The longer one is Mercedes Matrix (2020), in which we watch a montage of the gradual deconstruction of a Mercedes car using tools and brute force. This task was undertaken by the artist herself, supported by her father and other male relatives. Wearing smart black suits and sunglasses, they appear unapproachable and "cool", in contrast to the hard manual work they do to demolish the car, for which more durable work clothes would probably be more appropriate. The performance refers to the subsistence work that the Selman family does, like many other Roma in the country. The national economy of Bosnia and Herzegovina is one of the five weakest in Europe, living conditions are poor and it is very difficult to secure a reasonable income. The work in the scrap yard and the physical reality of the environment that defines the author and her family permeates many levels of her work. In the case of Mercedes Matrix, the daily hard physical work - which is also perceived as inferior by the majority society - is integrated into the reality of artistic (co)work. Art is used here as a tool to transform the value of work performance. Just as the Selman family's livelihood depends on the value of metals and parts extracted from discarded cars and sent for recycling, during the collaborative performative act, scrap metal is transformed into a valuable resource for survival - the artistic royalty of the performance. The act of recycling this manual labour into art has given it a new quality as a work of art, and also highlights the universal potential of art to transform the value and shift the meaning of different activities from their everyday, non-artistic context. "Art, like my family, transforms the value of scrap metal," says the artist.
The second performance, entitled You Have No Idea, is a shorter but all the more intense record of the artist shouting over and over again during her frenetic movement through the city: 'You have no idea. You. Have. No. Idea!" With a display that shifts between vulnerability and aggression, she pushes back against gender, racial and other culturally encoded assumptions about her identity and life experience, defying them and defining herself against primal expectations of how she should behave as a woman. She herself refers to this intimate performance as an expression of frustration at the complacency with which others place her in binding and flattening boxes, as if they know and understand her identity, life trajectory, goals, or personal experiences.
The physical part of the exhibition surrounding these videos consists of selected artworks from the series Paintings on Metal, which Selman has been creating continuously since 2018. Paintings in acrylic on scrap metal pieces depict impressions of everyday life, references to art history, and text collages reminiscent of diary entries or notes from observations of the world around him and its written and unwritten rules. Similar to the Mercedes Matrix performance, this position of Selman's work questions the value and relationships between scrap metal, technology and art, whose boundaries she is constantly exploring.
A recurring motif here is the self-portrait of the artist, who looks down on visitors to the exhibition as if watching their reactions to the action in the projected footage of her live events. With a stern expression and perhaps even a subtle hint of skepticism, she observes the emotions evoked by the themes and issues her work highlights. An unspoken question seems to hang in the air: What will you do with all that I am presenting here? Will you judge and evaluate me, or will you reflect on your own prejudices and stereotypes?
Photo: Mario Ilic
