Events

Selma Selman: Me postojisarav - Postojim - I exist

[ART] Selma Selman walks into a room and she’s regular. She’s wearing a dress over winter-knit tights and her heavy thick hair is only partially gathered by a scrunchie in a tail atop her head. Her eyes are green and her teeth are European—and when she laughs her body folds in on itself, as if in containment. I recognize her in that moment; the social gagging of the partially assimilated. The strained softening of those whose bloodlines hearken over centuries of forced diaspora. Our laughter is too wild. Our laughter gets us kicked off of wine trains and denied entry into the silent halls of national institutions. I feel connected. We are kindred. 

Someone puts on traditional Balkan music and she begins to dance and her movements are magnificent and unattainable. I am suddenly the white dude at a kegger in Clarence when a gaggle of chill young black kids from the East Side wander in. I am ready to watch. I have been waiting my entire life for this moment. Cuz ain’t I a down ass white dude? Look at this slick perfected dab! Ain’t I a gypsy? Hasn’t my pinterest photo log of dried flower bundles, velveteen blazers and low-level feminism blown your mind?

Selma is Roma. Selma says you know nothing. In Europe, right now the word Gypsy is a slur. Gypsy is the old Nigger. Gypsy is a marker for peoples killed with impunity through the Ages for being stateless. Gypsy is a state of emergency. An air-raid siren that never goes off. A ghetto because no one will rent out an apartment in a nicer area to your family. A dead-end job because your name is funny. A purse-clutched tighter in a shared elevator. People in awe at your dance moves because all you have left is movement.

Black and Roma commonality lies in objectistruction* (equal parts objectification/institutional destruction) and Selma’s immense multidisciplinary body of work is in direct antithesis to the genteel re-imaginings of the carefree Roma. Selma speaks of statelessness, the collective resignation of stereotypical portrayals that at this very moment have socially castrated an entire group of people. In the wake of these horrors, a tapestry of resilience is being weaved; blending familial strengths, intellectual curiosity and commonalities that span ethnicity and time. 

The Roma are not an abstract. Selma is flesh and blood and now she will speak for herself.

On Friday, March 4, Dreamland showcases the first U.S. solo exhibition of Selma Selman, Bosnian artist of Roma origins, currently based in Syracuse, New York. Curated by Jasmina Tumbas, Me postojisarav – Postojim – I exist, presents Selman’s struggle with the questions of statelessness, multi-generational trauma, and survival. Land and body become sites of emancipation and persecution for Selman, which the artist explores in video-works, sound sculptures, paintings, and a new performance work. Selman complicates the notions of what it means to maintain self-sovereignty as a foreigner in her land of origin and her current home. Ultimately, her search for political resistance situates this confrontation within the gendered and radicalized presumptions about citizenship, belonging, and identity. Gallery opens for exhibition viewing at 6pm and performance begins at 8pm.

 

 

When:

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Where:

Dreamland

387 Franklin St.
Buffalo, NY
Phone: (716) 948-0943

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