You have no idea – Selma Selman

“You have no idea – you have no idea about my whole life”, says Selma Selman with regard to this most intimate of her performances. “You do not know who I am, nor do you know my happiness or sadness.

You know nothing of the presence or absence of pain in my life, nor how I feel at the moment I am performing this piece in front of an audience. You have no idea”. Poised between vulnerability and violence, the artist speaks, shouts, screams, whispers, whimpers the same phrase over and over again.

With her body, her voice and her straightforward grammar of refusal – subject verb object – Selman resists gendered, racialised and otherwise encoded presumptions about her identity and experience.

To the point of exhaustion, almost of self-annihilation, she repels the gaze of the however well-meaning other with her relentless reiteration. In the process, she reveals the power dynamics of empathy, casting doubt upon its fitness as a basis for political encounter.

Watch Selma Selman’s live performance of You have no idea at the National Gallery of Kosovo. The live performance will be recorded and screened as an installation throughout Manifesta 14 Prishtina.