Art Unquoted

Esenija Bannan and Charlotte Desaga discuss Selma Selman’s paintings, performances and material language, from portraits on scrapyard metal to Mercedes Matrix and Dirt 0. The conversation follows questions of value, Roma history, visible and overlooked labour, and the ways art changes context without erasing material memory. As Selman puts it: “Transformation is at the core of my practice: scrap metal into gold, stigmatized labour into prestigious labour, incapacity into invention.”

This dialogue examines Kubra Khademi’s inversion of Forugh Farrokhzad’s feminist poem in Let us believe in the beginning of the hot season, a project combining gouache drawings, photo collages, and film. Esenija Bannan and Charlotte Desaga discuss the work’s allegory of US–Afghanistan relations, its pandemic collaboration with Daniel Pettrow, and the tension between biography, trauma, context, and artistic execution. They also consider Khademi’s 18kg performance and her contribution to WIR at the German Bundestag.

In this solo Art Unquoted Note, Esenija Bannan reflects on her first visit to Seoul, beginning with JeeMin Kim’s Prototype Temples at Hwigyumjae and moving through Frieze Seoul and the city beyond the fair. Kim’s installations bring painting, sound, movement and fragments of memory into temporary worlds. Bannan considers how places shape attention—and how an art scene is made through different speeds, spaces and forms of encounter.

In this dialogue, Charlotte Desaga and Esenija Bannan consider Agnes Martin’s statement, “I paint with my back to the world.” They discuss her turn away from representation, the emotional force of hand-drawn grids and imperfect lines, and the New Mexico works titled With My Back to the World. The conversation asks how Martin’s paintings bring a private, non-visible kind of beauty into view without explaining or justifying it.

Charlotte Desaga and Esenija Bannan discuss Jordan Wolfson’s animatronics, robotics and virtual-reality works, focusing on Little Room at Fondation Beyeler. Wolfson says, “I stuff the intuitive inside of the practical.” The conversation follows that tension through Goethe’s idea of intuition, the uncanny body, internet culture and technological aesthetics, asking whether machines can express desire, vulnerability and the mystery of being human.