Sleeping Guards
Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam
29 January – 21 April 2025

The recipient of this year’s ABN AMRO Art Award is the artist Selma Selman (1991). As part of the award, Selman is putting together an exhibition titled Sleeping Guards, on view starting January 29, 2025, at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. The exhibition will showcase work in a variety of media — including performance, drawing, installation, and film — with which Selman compellingly and poetically addresses the position of women while questioning the manner in which society assigns value to labor and materials.

Sleeping Guards features the installation Motherboards, a sculpture made from remnants of the aforementioned performance. The exhibition also features three miniature gold objects, including Motherboards (A Golden Nail) and the newly created Motherboards (Spoon), which are gilded with the gold extracted from the motherboards of previous performances. Another installation features giant mechanical grapples—a familiar item in Selman’s family’s scrap metal business—which she transforms into ‘living’ flowers: kinetic sculptures that open and close. In the film Crossing the Blue Bridge, her mother’s traumatic experiences of the Bosnian War are transformed into a symbol of activism and feminism that merges memory, history, and mythology. The exhibition is permeated by the fragrance The Most Dangerous Woman in the World, created by the artist in collaboration with scent designers, and also includes a new series of drawings in which female figures metamorphose into hybrid beings, suggesting the artist’s personal exploration of fluid identities.

Selman draws links between opposing states and qualities: dream and reality, aggression and vulnerability. This can be observed, for instance, in the ambiguous title Sleeping Guards, which could also include the notion of “sleep guardians”—invisible forces that watch over Selman’s alternately strategic, activism-oriented, and emotionally resonant work.

Photo by Gert Jan Van Rooij