Selma Selman’s drawings exist on equal terms with her many other artistic endeavors; they represent neither sketches nor documentation of her numerous theatre pieces, videos, paintings or photographs. They are instead the means of expression by which she visualizes aspects of personal experience defined by such practices as the racist isolation, humiliation, degradation, classification, and denunciation of those who are “different” or “foreign.”

As a member of the largest minority community in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Selma Selman grew up in the Bihać settlement Ružica, known locally as the Roma ghetto or “Gypsy settlement.” In her personal experiences and memories she can recall numerous events and situations in which she was reluctantly obliged to assume the role of second-class person, in accordance with an imposed model to which she is presumed to naturally be subject.

The drawings from the series Superpositional Intersectionalism are a recapitulation of these personal traumas—the telling, yet inexpressible frustrations of a woman in a patriarchal environment, a Roma woman in Bosnia and Herzegovina but also in Europe, a Muslim woman in America, a female artist in a nonprogressive environment, not to mention the many other intricate layers of familiar identity that she draws on. The superimposed intersectionalism—of the interactions between minorities and interactions of multiple systems of oppression and discrimination—consists in the personal diary of a heroine of today’s distorted world, someone shaped by the crises of capitalism and the tensions of rising neo-fascism, a general feeling of discontent, and the rebellion of the marginalized individual, someone who is closely attuned to those frequencies of life and work that lie closest to fear and anxiety. These are determined by her social status and numerous identities—gender, ethnic, national, class, professional, as well as many others in which she almost inevitably falls into the category of “other.” 

Selman is the protagonist of decolonial solidarity, sustained on the emancipated truth of personal social experience. Hence the reasoning that Selma Selman in her artistic endeavours fundamentally belongs to the category of those engaged individuals who “represent and support the demoralized, depoliticized and unorganized members of various marginalized social groups in order to promote collective social action in the dissemination of freedom, democracy and individuality.” 

At the same time, the intellectual desire for a higher-level consideration of the ethics, with the resolutely complex and difficult issues this in turn implies, has defined Selman’s difficult path. The state of precariousness offers an artist a certain legitimacy in setting up a border region, a space that in turn serves as a medium by which to unite artistic work with reality—be it through a gallery performance or an artistic performance known as post-studio practice. As a consequence, Selma Selman continually engages with her own particular artistic reality given that the “unwanted, exotic theme” arose out of the circumstances of being “both a woman and an ‘other,’ as well as Muslim and a true foreigner in the United States, Europe, and even Bosnia. “Such a framework forms an ideal starting point for the design and creation of protocols and tools by which—with a clear ideological awareness—to define a new, performative means of drama, one that draws on the political and on the encounters of “first” and “second.”

Dr. Irfan Hošić

Superpositional Intersectionalism

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