Selma Selman opens “1000 Tears” in Bergamo: her first solo exhibition at an Italian institution

The Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art of Bergamo, GAMeC, presents “1000 Tears”, Selma Selman’s first solo exhibition at an Italian institution, as artdaily reports. The exhibition opened on 1 October 2026 and will run until 24 January 2027.

Selman, born in 1991 in Bihać, Bosnia and Herzegovina, is today considered one of the most important voices on the international art scene. Most of her artistic research is built around the history of her family and of the Roma community she comes from. Her practice investigates systems of power and the ways they shape value, visibility, memory and belonging, moving between painting, film, performance and research-based forms.

At the centre of the project is a photograph taken during the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, in which the artist appears as a child alongside members of her family. Selman takes this image as a starting point to return to the people portrayed, to collect their testimonies and to ask how time transforms identities and personal and collective narratives. From these encounters a new series of graphic works has been born, translating stories and fragments of life into images suspended between reality and fiction.

At the heart of the exhibition space is a new fragment of the film “Crossing the Blue Bridge” (2024), built on an episode the artist experienced in 1994: during a ceasefire, her mother crossed the Bihać bridge with her daughters — a bridge then covered with bodies and dog carcasses. The artist recreates that scene by walking, thirty years later, in her mother’s footsteps. The tension between looking and hiding runs through the whole exhibition and returns in the pictorial works made on metal — a material that refers directly to her family’s history, dedicated for generations to collecting and trading scrap.

The exhibition also includes the intimate universe of “Letters to Omer”, a project Selman has been developing since 2021 through letters addressed to an imaginary interlocutor. On the occasion of “1000 Tears”, the artist’s book “Dear Omer” is published, edited by GAMeC and published by CURA., collecting 140 letters written over the last six years, with an afterword by writer Aleksandar Hemon.

The project is part of the museum’s annual programme “Pedagogy of Hope”. Beyond her artistic practice, Selman is the founder of the project “Get the Heck to School” (2017), which promotes access to education for Roma girls in her hometown.