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.
Among the most significant voices on the international art scene, Selman (Bihać, 1991) interweaves autobiographical elements with social reflection, addressing themes of belonging, representation, marginalization, and discrimination, exploring the possibility of imagining alternative forms of existence. Furthermore, war bubbles beneath the surface of her works as an additional cornerstone of her research, emerging as a reality that continues to inhabit bodies and relationships.
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. Based on encounters and conversations with the subjects of the photograph, Selman has developed a new body of graphic works for GAMeC that translate stories and fragments of life into images suspended between reality and fiction.
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 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.
This tension between vision and concealment permeates the entire exhibition and returns in the pictorial works executed on metal. 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 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. For GAMeC, the artist will produce a site-specific installation where various letters will occupy the corridor of Spazio Zero. Designed for free and continuous circulation, the texts will invite visitors to collect them, thereby activating a direct relationship with the public.
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, 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.