Selma Selman
Platinum

Artist
Selma Selman

Title
Platinum

Year of creation
2021-23

Technology and dimensions
car parts, precious metals (platinum, palladium, rhodium, silver, gold)

Year of acquisition
2024

Acquisition of friends of the National Gallery with the support of Marc Müller.

Selma Selman is a Bosnian artist with Rome*NJA background who deals with performance, painting, photography, video installations and text work with autobiographical experiences, social stereotypicals, racist discrimination, violence and sexism as well as environmental and socio-economic questions. Your installation Platinum created for the Hamburg station - Nationalgalerie seems like a post -apocalyptic landscape: cut -off car wrecks spread over the floor. It's hard to imagine that they once rolled across the street. For Selman, they stand less for the end of civilization than for an income and creation source. Following the model of her family, who, like many Roma, who lives in Bosnia-Herzegovina, earns a living with the trade of old metal, the artist removed the catalysts from the cars before they cut them. Catalysts are attractive in that they contain valuable precious metals for reducing environmentally harmful exhaust emissions, including platinum, palladium and rhodium. From the contents of the catalysts, Selman - with the help of a chemical engineer - gained a small precious lump of precious metal. Its value is not only material, but also ideally: Roma has been supplying recycling for about 100 years. However, only recent times is the moral, socio -economic, ecological and now artistic value of such a practice.

Catherine Nichols, curator (Hamburg train station - National Gallery of the present)