Art Basel Unlimited 2023
| Venue: | Messe Basel, Messeplatz 10, 4058 Basel, Switzerland |
| Date: | Jun 15 – 18, 2023 |
Description
acb Gallery | Unlimited sector | booth U4
Selma Selman (1991, Bihać, Bosnia and Herzegovina) is one of the youngest and most exciting flag-bearers of a long tradition of critical and political performance from the ex-Yugoslav area, who works with performance, video, photography, drawing and painting. For Art Basel Unlimited, Selma Selman realized a new large-scale altarlike painting with parts of a dismantled car, turning a car top, doors and trunk lid into a six-part complex sculptural piece. On the newly conceived work, organic, tender shapes evoking hybrid, uncanny human bodies with elongated, spider-like limbs, with closed or multiple eyes fusion into one another, creating an unsettling contrast between the softness of forms and the cold metal car parts on which they are painted. Evoking both the fragility and the fierceness of female spiders that particularly express in its preparatory drawings, the piece, similarly to Selman’s first paintinginstallation titled Six pieces of Mercedes-Benz (2022), continues a cycle that started with her video-performance Mercedes Matrix (2019), in which she is joined by male members of her family in dismantling a Mercedes-Benz, a symbol of affluence and status across Selman’s original Romani community in the Balkans and indeed much of the globe.
Selma Selman earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts in 2014 from the Painting Department of the Academy of Arts at Banja Luka University. She studied sociology and anthropology at Central European University in Budapest before she graduated in 2018 from Syracuse University, New York with a Master of Fine Arts in Transmedia, Visual and Performing Arts. She currently lives and works between Bosnia, and the Netherlands, where she studies at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten. Selman participated in 2022 at Documenta 15 (Kassel, Germany), and at Manifesta 14 (Prishtina, Kosovo). In 2021 the National Gallery in Sarajevo (Bosnia and Herzegovina) launched a survey exhibition of her work. In the last few years Selman had several solo exhibitions, in 2022 at Kunstraum Innsbruck (Austria), in 2021 at Kasseler Kunstverein (Germany) and participated in several group shows, in 2022 at Shedhalle (Zürich, Switzerland), in 2021 at Art Encounters biennale (Timișoara, Romania), in 2020 at Kunsthalle Wien (Vienna, Austria) and notably at the Roma Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2019 among others
