Selma Selman is a visual artist from Bosnia and Herzegovina and is of Romani origin. In her art works, the ultimate aim is to protect and empower female bodies and, in her own words “to enact a cross-scalar approach to collective self-emancipation of oppressed women.” Selma’s search for functional, contemporary political resistance stems from her personal experience with oppression from various directions and scales. Selman is also the founder of the organization “Get The Heck To School”, which aims to empower Roma girls all around the world who faced ostracization from society and poverty. She employs a variety of media, including performance, photography, painting, video installation and poetry. For Kunstfort Voices, Selman contributed with a poignant, activist poem in which she mercilessly exposes women’s oppression, racism and inequality.

“You get shot in the head”
 
They say gypsies steal
So the government steals
For free expression in these years
You get shot in the head
When I was little I was beaten
Because I’m radical
And now everyone is fucking each other
In order to buy the latest western cars
Every day we cheat Allah for petty cash
and pray that they do not set us on fire in
Hell
These who steal hundreds of millions
pay ahead of time for the place in Heaven
Hatred and fear reign every day
Ignorance and hunger is the foundation in which everyone
Builds their freedom while
The poor take cheap cocaine from which
Their bones are falling apart
Life is lived in silence with unhappy people
Who build towers and monuments
Because they don’t know anything else
They say that symbol of the city I grew up in is
A statue of a naked girl
So she stands naked and brave
while others jerk off on her
And what if you made dick as a monument
So that we women can masturbate as well
Yet you get tired of trying

Selma Selman, 2020

As long as the lockdown continues and the Kunstfort remains closed, we invite a different artist each month to share a textual work, poem or story with us. This can either be their own work or that of someone else.