Selma Selman: 1000 Tears

GAMeC—Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Bergamo presents 1000 Tears, the first solo exhibition by artist Selma Selman in an Italian institution.

Among the most significant voices on the international art scene, Selman—born in 1991 in Bihać, Bosnia and Herzegovina—has built much of her research around the history of her family and community.

Her practice investigates systems of power and the ways in which they shape value, visibility, memory, and belonging. Moving across painting, film, performance, and research-based forms, she examines how social, economic, political, and cultural structures determine whose bodies, histories, labor, and experiences are recognized, represented, or erased.

The core of the project is a photograph taken during the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, featuring the artist as a child alongside members of her family. Selman adopts this image as a starting point to return to the people portrayed, to gather their testimonies and question how time transforms both personal and collective identities and narratives.

Based on encounters and conversations with the subjects of the photograph, Selman has developed a new body of graphic works for GAMeC that translate stories and fragments of life into images suspended between reality and fiction.

At the center of the exhibition space, a new excerpt from Crossing the Blue Bridge (2024) will be presented—a film developed from an episode experienced by the artist in 1994 when, during a ceasefire, her mother crossed the Bihać bridge with her daughters. At the time, it was covered with corpses and dog carcasses. To protect her sister from this sight, her mother tried to cover the child’s eyes with one hand, while holding newly purchased food supplies with the other. A strong wind continuously blew her hair across her face, preventing her from seeing and turning the crossing into an experience suspended between strenuous perception and disorientation. In the film, the artist evokes that scene, retracing her mother’s steps on the same bridge thirty years later. Memory seems to conjure a past permeated by shadow zones and persistent darkness, where images remain incomplete or inaccessible. This condition permanently inhabits the artist’s gaze, deeply influencing her perception of the present. 
In the looped sequence of Crossing the Blue Bridge, the artist’s face remains constantly hidden. The viewer follows a figure running from behind toward—and simultaneously fleeing from—something unseen. 

This tension between vision and concealment permeates the entire exhibition and returns in the pictorial works executed on metal—a material Selman frequently employs, which refers directly to the history of her family, who have been dedicated to scrap metal salvaging and trading for generations. Preserving their original dents and scratches, these surfaces accommodate bodies and faces that turn the gaze into a space of vulnerability, but also into one of resistance.

The exhibition also features the intimate universe of Letters to Omer, a project Selman has been developing since 2021 through a series of letters addressed to an imaginary interlocutor who becomes the recipient of reflections, desires, anger, memories, and visions of the future.

On the occasion of 1000 Tears, the artist’s book Dear Omer will be released: edited by GAMeC and published by CURA., this work brings together 140 letters written by Selman to Omer over the last six years.

Accompanied by an afterword by writer Aleksandar Hemon, the volume extends a practice that spans Selman’s entire body of work directly into the space of reading.

Throughout the exhibition project, female genealogy, Roma history, and the capacity to continuously reinvent one’s own narrative become tools to counter processes of erasure and produce alternative narratives, capable of reinterpreting the past and opening up new possibilities for the future.

In this perspective, the project aligns with the museum’s annual program, Pedagogy of Hope, embodying one of its core principles: learn to unlearn. By reclaiming marginalized memories and challenging consolidated representations, Selman’s work invites us to develop new ways of understanding the present and to imagine different ways of inhabiting the world. This vision also finds expression outside her artistic practice in Get the Heck to School, a project founded by the artist in 2017 to foster education access for Roma girls in her hometown. 

The exhibition is part of a series of initiatives staged with the support of the Club GAMeC.

Pedagogy of Hope is developed with the artistic direction of Lorenzo Giusti through a co-design process involving GAMeC’s Education Department, led by Sara Tonelli with Rachele Bellini, and the curators Sara Fumagalli, Valentina Gervasoni, and Irene Guandalini.