Since 2014, Selma Selman has used fragments of scrap metal as the supports for her paintings. In doing so, she draws directly on her family’s means of survival: for generations, her family has worked in the scrap-metal trade.
Recycled car hoods, vehicle doors, metal pipes, and other discarded materials are transformed in Selman’s practice into art objects that merge the categories of sculpture, relief, and painting. Her works are often self-portraits and serve as expressions of her engagement with her own personal history as well as with the suppressed histories of Roma communities in Southeast Europe—communities that have been displaced, oppressed, and defamed for centuries, including in the present day during the violent wars in Bosnia and Kosovo.
Central to her work is the role of women, alongside a critical confrontation with the patriarchal traditions, rules, and unwritten laws within Roma communities, where male lineage and forced marriages remain widespread. Her 2025 exhibition at Kunsthuis SYB in the Netherlands, titled '600 Years of Migrant Mothers', sought to narrate the centuries-old history of displacement and disregard—hovering between reality and fiction—from a female perspective.
'Ophelia’s Awakening' was also the title of her first exhibition in 2025 at her Berlin gallery. Selma Selman deliberately invokes the tragic female figure from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, who has inspired countless artists, writers, theatre makers, and filmmakers. Ophelia has awakened; she will not drown in immortal beauty in a pond.