Image: Galleria d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Bergamo
GAMeC will present ‘1000 Tears’ from 1 October 2026 through 24 January 2027. The exhibition is Selma Selman’s first solo exhibition at an Italian institution and forms part of the ‘Pedagogia della Speranza’ programme. The exhibition is one of the initiatives supported by Club GAMeC.
The project includes a new body of graphic works, paintings on metal, an excerpt from the film ‘Crossing the Blue Bridge’ (2024), a new configuration of ‘Letters to Omer’ and the artist’s book ‘Dear Omer’, edited by GAMeC and published by CURA.
The new graphic works develop from a photograph taken during the Bosnian war that shows Selman as a child with her family. In these works, hands and gestures become the means through which memory takes form.
An excerpt from ‘Crossing the Blue Bridge’ (2024) follows Selman three decades later as she retraces her mother’s steps across a bridge in Bihać during a ceasefire in 1994. At that time, her mother was trying to protect her daughters from seeing corpses and animal carcasses.
Selman was born in 1991 in Bihać, Bosnia and Herzegovina. In 2017, she founded ‘Get the Heck to School’ to support Roma girls’ access to education in her hometown.
