Selma Selman: 600 Years of Migrant Mothers

Kunsthuis SYB is pleased to present 600 Years of Migrant Mothers, a new solo exhibition by Selma Selman. The exhibition features a new series of monumental paintings, along with films, drawings, and research material. This project is a collaboration between two Frisian art institutions: Kunsthuis SYB and Arcadia - Paradys. 

The exhibition brings forward a larger research project by Selman, in which she delves into her ‘foremothers’ going back six hundred years in her family lineage. Selman tries to give a face to the women from whom she descends. Women who have helped shape her into who she is today, but who themselves often remain invisible. 600 Years of Migrant Mothers addresses the intimate bond between knowledge and power. Who has access to their foremothers, the artist asks? And how does that access constitute power dynamics on a broader political spectrum? 

Selman explores how stories shared around the kitchen table are often forgotten and inaccessible to current generations, particularly for people embedded in marginalized communities. Genealogy, the practice of gathering, storing, and sharing information about family relations, is an area of knowledge where the feminist dictum “the personal is political” becomes clearly evident. For Selman, unpacking female family lineage means unpacking years of displacement of Roma communities in Southeast Europe. In cities such as Prishtina, Sarajevo and Bihać, male lineage is primarily valued and celebrated. The artist embarks on an effort to trace generations of mothers, both real and invented, combining feminist strategies of fictional genealogy with historical research and interviews. Her work is an effort to visualize women between borders, ghosts that come in a dream and speak in a language one no longer understands but recognizes: faces encountered in moments of joy and despair; names on graves in cities far from one’s current home; and long hair extending into reality from a fictional future.

The artworks have a haunting quality. A group of women of different generations are immortalized in a large metal diptych where an eyeless self portrait of the artist receives their sight. Books, drawings, film footage and sounds gathered around graveyards where Roma people are buried, coexist with scenes from a wedding. When facts are missing or deliberately erased, imagination becomes a weapon to reconstruct the blind spots and can offer a point of contact with the future. Can we visualize what the world could or should look like from the perspective of the displaced female?

600 Years of Migrant Mothers is Selma Selman’s first solo exhibition in the bilingual region of Friesland, and is curated by Arnisa Zeqo. The series of new works are co-commissioned with Arcadia, for the exhibition Paradys, in dialogue with curator Hans den Hartog Jager. The project includes research into Roma communities in Prishtina conducted by Blerta Ismaili and the CHwB Kosovo.