Selma Selman
Selma Selman is an artist from Bosnia and Herzegovina and of Roma origin. She earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts in 2014 from the Department of Painting at the University of Banja Luka. In 2018, she graduated from Syracuse University with a Master of Fine Arts in Transmedia, Visual, and Performing Arts. In her practice, Selman strives to protect and enable female bodies and foster a multifaceted approach to the collective self-emancipation of oppressed women. Selman’s search for a pragmatic, contemporary form of political resistance stems from her own experiences of oppression of varied directions and scales. Selman is also the founder of the organization Get the Heck to School, which aims to empower Roma girls across the globe who face social ostracization and poverty.
You Have No Idea (Election Day)
2020
HD video, 4 min. 58 s.
“You have no idea — you have no idea about my whole life”, says Selma Selman with regard to this most intimate of her performances. “You do not know who I am, nor do you know my happiness or sadness. You know nothing of the presence or absence of pain in my life, nor how I feel at the moment I am performing this piece in front of an audience. You have no idea”. Poised between vulnerability and violence, the artist speaks, shouts, screams, whispers, and whimpers the same phrase over and over again.
With her body, her voice and her straightforward grammar of refusal — subject verb object — Selman resists gendered, racialized and otherwise encoded presumptions about her identity and experience. To the point of exhaustion, almost of self-annihilation, she repels the gaze of the however well-meaning other with her relentless reiteration. In the process, she reveals the power dynamics of empathy and the fraught politics of solidarity, casting doubt upon its fitness as a basis for political encounter.
Videographer: Hatum Cesar Saenz Painemilla
Editing: Chonga Peter Lee
Crossing the Blue Bridge
2024
16mm film transferred to digital, 27 min. 15 s.
Crossing the Blue Bridge is a film by Selma Selman that revisits her mother’s memories of the war in Bihać in 1994, drawing on personal narratives as living archives of conflict and survival. Through layered storytelling, Selman reconstructs these intimate recollections, situating them within the broader socio-political and cultural contexts she navigates as a Roma artist from post-war Bosnia and Herzegovina. In engaging with memory as an embodied archive, the film not only reflects on identity and resilience but also questions whose histories are preserved, remembered, and made visible. It resonates with broader struggles faced by Romani communities globally, challenging the silences and omissions within dominant historical narratives.
Director and Writer: Selma Selman
Producers: Amra Bakšić Camo, Ishak Jalimam
Director of Photography: Almir Đikoli
First Assistant Director: Luka Vlaho
Production Manager: Haris Kamenčić
Production Coordinator: Kristina Jeličanin
First Camera Assistant: Edib Ahmetasević
Second Camera Assistant: Skender Đikoli
Third Camera Assistant: Darko Vučić
Sound Recorder: Nirvan Imamović
Production Assistants: Amar Teskeredžić, Adi Zulović
Driver: Mirza Imamović
Production Design and Editing: Jon Perez, Chongha Peter Lee
Sound Design: Jon Perez, Dauwd Al Hilali, Chongha Peter Lee
Thank you: Center for Contemporary Art Sarajevo, K Light Sarajevo, Eho Doo, Adis Đapo, Nedim Branković, Safet Kutlovac, Sejdalija Kutlovac, Béla Tarr, Amila Ramovic, Radmila Petrovic, Sasha Tatic, Muhamed Selman, Sasha from USK TV
The biggest thank you to my family and of course to my mother and sister.
Production: Realstage, Antifragile agency
Commissioned by: Röda Sten Konsthall, Schirn Kunsthalle, Kulturhauptstadt Bad Ischl, Salzkammergut 2024 Gmbh, European Capital of Culture Bad Ischl
Filmed in Bihać (BA)