Selma Selman – Flowers of Life, 2024 / 2026

Five steel flowers open and close as their hydraulics hiss and groan. From within their toothed jaws, painted eyes keep watch. The fragrance The Most Dangerous Woman in the World (2024), created in collaboration with perfumers, fills the room with the smell of engine oil and petrol. Flowers of Life incorporates grapples of the kind used in the scrap-metal trade that sustains Selma Selman’s family in Bihać, Bosnia and Herzegovina. The work draws on their knowledge and on longstanding Roma practices of recovering and reusing materials, which long predate sustainability as a social aspiration and a climate imperative. The flowers’ relentless mechanical choreography reframes this industrial garden – and the scrapyard behind it – as a source of life and raw beauty. Family labour draws value from discarded matter and changes what counts as waste.

Selma Selman draws on her personal history and Roma heritage to address labour, value and the structures that govern social and economic life. Through performance, installation and sculpture, she transforms materials drawn from industrial production and waste. Her practice confronts structural inequalities, gender relations, education and social exclusion, examining how power operates through visible and invisible mechanisms.