Selma Selman: Dear Omer and the Intimate Histories of 1000 Tears

Selma Selman’s Dear Omer is a new artist’s book produced on the occasion of 1000 Tears, the artist’s first solo exhibition in an Italian institution, presented at GAMeC – Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea in Bergamo. Bringing together 140 letters written over several years, the book offers an intimate entry point into Selman’s artistic practice, exploring love, conflict, memory, desire and the complexities of human relationships.

The letters are addressed to Omer, an unidentified figure with whom Selman develops an evolving relationship marked by intimacy and distance. Moving between personal reflection, anger, longing and poetic imagination, the texts create a space in which private experience opens onto broader questions of identity and belonging. An afterword by writer Aleksandar Hemon accompanies the collection, alongside thoughts, ideas and poetic images closely connected to Selman’s work.

Selman has been developing the Letters to Omer project since 2021. The correspondence forms part of a wider artistic practice in which autobiography becomes a way to examine social structures, cultural memory and the experiences that shape individual and collective identities. The figure of Omer remains deliberately unresolved, allowing the letters to move between the personal and the imagined, between direct address and a broader reflection on relationships, vulnerability and self-understanding.

The book was produced for 1000 Tears, which opened at GAMeC in Bergamo on 1 October 2026 and runs until 24 January 2027. The exhibition brings together works rooted in Selman’s family history and the history of her community, examining how memory, war, discrimination and belonging continue to shape the present.

At the centre of the exhibition is a photograph taken during the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina, showing Selman as a child with members of her family. Drawing on conversations with the people in the image, the artist develops new graphic works that translate memories and fragments of lived experience into images suspended between reality and fiction. The exhibition also features an excerpt from Crossing the Blue Bridge (2024), in which Selman revisits a bridge in Bihać that her mother crossed with her daughters during the war.

Across these works, Selman explores the tension between visibility and concealment, vulnerability and resistance. Personal and family histories become a means of confronting the erasure of marginalised experiences and imagining alternative narratives of the past and future.

In this context, Dear Omer offers another way into the intimate and reflective dimensions of Selman’s practice. Through its letters, the book connects individual emotions with broader questions of memory, identity and the possibility of communicating across distance. Together, the publication and exhibition invite audiences to consider how personal stories can challenge established representations and open up new ways of understanding shared experience.

Book: Dear Omer
Artist: Selma Selman
Publisher/producer: GAMeC
Afterword: Aleksandar Hemon
Exhibition: 1000 Tears
Venue: GAMeC – Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Bergamo, Italy
Dates: 1 October 2026 – 24 January 2027

More information: GAMeC – Selma Selman: 1000 Tears