From October 1, 2026, to January 24, 2027, GAMeC – Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Bergamo presents '1000 Tears', the first solo exhibition by artist Selma Selman in an Italian institution.
The core of the project, presented in the museum’s Spazio Zero, is a photograph taken during the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, featuring the artist as a child alongside members of her family. Selma 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.
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, known as the “Blue Bridge,” with her daughters.
At the time, the bridge 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; the artist has repeatedly described her relationship with the places of her childhood as a perception marked by persistent darkness, where memory coincides with incomplete and sometimes inaccessible images. At the same time, this condition continues to influence how the artist views the present, suggesting that trauma is a permanent condition inhabiting her gaze.
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 dents, scratches, and traces of their past life, these surfaces accommodate bodies and faces capable of transforming 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 Selma 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 Selma Selman to Omer over the last six years.
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 categories and representations, Selma 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 access to education for Roma girls in her hometown. Through academic support programs and awareness-raising initiatives, the organization promotes education as a concrete practice of individual emancipation and collective transformation, extending into the social fabric those demands for self-determination that run throughout Selma Selman’s entire artistic research.
