Selma Selman: Motherboards

To celebrate the opening weekend of The Gatherers, join artist Selma Selman (Bosnian, b. 1991) for the US premiere of her performance Motherboards in the courtyard. The performance involves the removal of precious alloys from disused computers, a reverse extraction process that reclaims materials stripped from the earth. Accompanied by guitarists and opera singers, Selman and her collaborators hammer the sleek machines to expose their internal mechanisms. Selman’s family, part of a Roma community in Bosnia, owns a business sorting and salvaging scrap metal. Here, she recasts the labor of recycling—practiced for generations by Roma people and recognized only recently by the Western mainstream—into a performance that draws on tactics of adaptation, survival, and reclamation. After the performance, Selman will work with a chemical engineer and a goldsmith to transform the extracted material into new works. You can find one of these in the galleries: Nail (2025) is a gold-gilded sculpture composed of metal sourced from the scrapped circuit boards of computers. Through laborious performances, Selman asks us to reconsider assumptions about value, challenging the way cast-off materials, identities, and histories are appraised.

The performance features artist and composer Aaron David Ross (ADR) and musician Michael Beharie.