AMSTERDAM.- The recipient of this year’s ABN AMRO Art Award is the artist Selma Selman (1991). As part of the award, Selman is putting together an exhibition titled Sleeping Guards, on view starting January 29, 2025, at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. The exhibition showcases work in a variety of media — including performance, drawing, installation, and film — with which Selman compellingly and poetically addresses the position of women while questioning the manner in which society assigns value to labor and materials.

THE MOST DANGEROUS WOMAN IN THE WORLD

Selma Selman is an artist and activist. Coming from a family of scrap metal dealers, she has a keen awareness of the importance of recycling and transformation. This understanding is the foundation of her multidisciplinary oeuvre. Selman once described herself as “the most dangerous woman in the world.” She’s been known to demolish cars and computers, at times wielding an axe. In other high-intensity performances, she expresses her anger at existing power relations and the urge to reverse them. However, her self-described persona as “the most dangerous woman” is also a reference to the prejudice toward people from the Roma community, such as Selman herself. She grew up in this community during and after the Bosnian War, and her personal experiences therein are central to her work. Thus, she frequently poses questions about stereotypes, traditional gender roles, and discrimination, transforming her experiences of these phenomena in a way that encourages reflection on society’s power structures.

PERFORMANCE

The exhibition begins with a large-scale performance of Motherboards, which Selman will stage for the first time in the Netherlands on January 29. In it, she and other family members demolish discarded computers in order to extract gold from their motherboards. The sounds generated by their efforts, which are accompanied by an opera singer, a guitarist, and a sound engineer, will be combined in real time with new texts by Selman to create a performance-opera of the same title.

SLEEPING GUARDS

Sleeping Guards features the installation Motherboards, a sculpture made from remnants of the aforementioned performance. The exhibition also features three miniature gold objects, including Motherboards (A Golden Nail) and the newly created Motherboards (Spoon), which are gilded with the gold extracted from the motherboards of previous performances. Another installation features giant mechanical grapples—a familiar item in Selman’s family’s scrap metal business—which she transforms into ‘living’ flowers: kinetic sculptures that open and close. In the film Crossing the Blue Bridge, her mother’s traumatic experiences of the Bosnian War are transformed into a symbol of activism and feminism that merges memory, history, and mythology. The exhibition is permeated by the fragrance The Most Dangerous Woman in the World, created by the artist in collaboration with scent designers, and also includes a new series of drawings in which female figures metamorphose into hybrid beings, suggesting the artist’s personal exploration of fluid identities.

Selman draws links between opposing states and qualities: dream and reality, aggression and vulnerability. This can be observed, for instance, in the ambiguous title Sleeping Guards, which could also include the notion of “sleep guardians”—invisible forces that watch over Selman’s alternately strategic, activism-oriented, and emotionally resonant work.

ADDITIONAL EXHIBTION AT THE ABN AMRO ART SPACE

In conjunction with the exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum, the ABN AMRO Art Space in the Zuidas business district is hosting a second solo exhibition of Selman’s work, titled Ophelia’s Awakening and featuring Paintings on Metal, a selection of recent works on scrap metal. The exhibition runs from January 29 to October 23, 2025. For more information on the ABN AMRO Art Award, see ABN AMRO Kunstprijs - ABN AMRO Art & Heritage.

Selma Selman is from Bosnia and Herzegovina and lives and works in New York, Amsterdam, and Bihać. She graduated with a bachelor’s degree in fine arts from the University of Banja Luka and a master’s degree in visual and performing arts from the University of Syracuse (NY), followed subsequently by a residency at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. Selman’s work has been shown in numerous solo and group exhibitions internationally, including at the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt (2024); Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (2023); Documenta 15, Kassel (2022); Manifesta 14, Pristina (2022); and the Fries Museum, Leeuwarden (2022). Selma Selman is the founder of Get the Heck to School, an organization committed to the empowerment of Roma girls from her hometown of Bihać who face poverty and ostracization from society.