In the ABN AMRO Art Space, ABN AMRO shares its collection with a wide audience through rotating presentations, provides a platform for new developments in art, and offers artists a stage in the Zuidas district. Currently on view are the collection presentation Digital Deluge and the ABN AMRO Art Prize exhibition Ophelia’s Awakening, featuring work by the current winner, Selma Selman. Both exhibitions are on display until 23 October 2025

Selma Selman is the winner of the twelfth ABN AMRO Art Prize, an award for female talent in the Netherlands. Selman (1991) is an artist and activist. Coming from a family of scrap dealers, she knows the necessity of recycling from home. This knowledge forms the core of her multidisciplinary oeuvre. Selman once described herself as ‘the most dangerous woman in the world’. In noisy performances, she demolishes cars and computers, sometimes with an axe. But ‘the most dangerous woman in the world’ is also a reference to the prejudice towards people from the Roma community, like Selman herself. She grew up in that community during and after the Bosnian civil war. In her work, her personal experiences are an important starting point. Stereotypical gender patterns and discrimination are recurring topics in it. It is precisely by incorporating these personal experiences in her art that she encourages reflection on the power structures in our society.

In Ophelia’s Awakening, Selman focuses – in a new series of Paintings on Metal – on the power of women. Unlike the melancholic figure in Shakespeare’s play Hamlet, Selman’s Ophelia is a defiant woman who knows her worth and reclaims her independence. With self-portraits on bonnets, Selman overturns traditional ideas of femininity and vulnerability. At the same time, she transforms the virtually worthless scrap metal into unexpectedly sensitive, surreal and valuable objects.

In painted texts, Selman addresses a fictional character, which she performs in her ongoing series Letters to Omer. In it, she raises issues about discrimination, sexuality and gender roles. ‘DEAR OMER / TAKING RISKS IS MY SAFE ZONE’ reads on one of the bonnets, for instance. Through these powerful and sometimes intimate statements, Selman wants to give women, and Roma women in particular, a prominent place in art and literature.

ABN AMRO Art Prize
As part of the ABN AMRO Art Prize, the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam is hosting a second exhibition of work by Selma Selman, entitled Sleeping Guards, from 29 January to 21 April 2025.

_{This exhibition will be closed to the public on 21, 24, and 25 May during Amsterdam Art Week}