Medusa (Do Not Look Into Our Eyes)

Since 2018, Selma Selman (b. 1991, Bosnia and Herzegovina) has drawn on her family’s history of working with scrap metal in a strand of her practice bridging painting and sculpture, in which she uses scrap metal as a canvas for a series of works she refers to collectively as Paintings on Metal. By harnessing her sensitivity to the latent potential of found objects, a quality she attributes to her experience of working on her father’s scrapyard, Selman has transformed discarded metal into a distinct medium through which to examine the systems of value and power that determine how materials, images, and narratives are classified and understood.

Initially adopted as a readily available material during her time as an art student, scrap metal has since acquired greater conceptual significance in Selman’s practice, conveying her interest in material histories and the contingencies which govern them. In her Paintings on Metal, she combines these concerns with depictions of everyday objects and motifs in art history which speak to the theme of transformation. In Medusa (Do Not Look Into Our Eyes), Selman depicts the mythological figure on the surface of an old car bonnet, with a direct, outward looking gaze that produces a confrontation between the work and its viewer. Speaking on the use of the gaze within her practice the artist says, “the gaze for me isn’t symbolic. It is something active and risky. It can actually do something… The materials are doing something similar. I’m using things like satellite antennas and wheel rims, objects that come from systems of movement, circulation and transmission. They’re not passive, they carry traces of use, of orientation, of signals moving through them. They don’t just sit in space, they register it, and in some way, they return it. They almost feel like they’re looking back.” 1

The work’s allusion to the myth of Medusa’s power to transform those who look at her into stone reinforces Selman’s broader interest in material transformation, both insofar as it relates to her family’s business in the scrap-metal industry in post-Yugoslavia, and as it develops through her own art-making. By transforming discarded metal objects into autonomous works of art, she utilises art’s capacity to reconfigure objects and their histories, using her work as a vehicle through which to address the personal, political and economic circumstances which have shaped her own life and practice.

1 https://guide.modernamuseet.se/stockholm/en/collection/house-of-nisaba/gorgons-do-not-look-into-our-eyes/