Mersud Selman’s latest Exhibition Beauty and Violence opened at the Kai Dikhas Gallery, the fifth of September 2019 with a performance and showing of his latest paintings.
“The work is an investigation of identities and roles. My self-portraits represent the spectrum of our appearance: the visible and the invisible. Seen through our own eyes and through the eyes of others. Reshaped by hopes, wishes, stereotypes and constraints. We’re surrounded by selfies as a basis of storytelling. Social media gives us a platform to connect and to share our realities with others. By sharing our faces in different stages we’re seemingly able to curate the image of ourselves. But we fall back on one of the biggest questions of existence: Who am I and who do I want to be?
Like children we are fascinated by our face in the mirror and create more and more images of ourselves to get new evidence of our existence. The act of painting myself reflects on the blind angles of the observer and collects the cheap promises, high expectations, the beauty and the violence we are all affected by. But only as single pieces can the images describe reality: as an incomplete puzzle of diversity.
Mersud Selman
The performance related to the series of self-portraits Beauty & Violence approaches the role of the observer. Standing in front of a white canvas, the art is pelted with red exemplifying the connection between beauty and violence. Red is the colour of love and death, the colour of roses and blood. While the imprint of my body will remain white on the canvas, I want to show through this performance that being shaped is always connected with risk: that you will become what your observer wishes to see.”
