Adelisa Selimbašić: Where we become each other

You’ve been dancing for hours. The beat pulses through your muscles and breath. The edges of your body vibrate and blur. The boundary between space and self dissolves.

You don’t enter this exhibition so much as get absorbed by it. Columns, body-width but taller than a person, fill the gallery. Figures emerge across their surfaces in looped beats painted in soft gradients and looping strokes — a leg in a black heel. A torso with a white vest slipping off one shoulder. Move between them, and you brush past bodies the way you do in a crowded club.

The back room (there is always a back room) is bathed in electric blue light. A horizontal band of paintings with hints of nipples and flashes of skin wraps all four walls at chest height. Any polite distance between bodies is erased. You feel your body because of everyone else’s proximity. The self starts to come undone. You are moving, or being moved.

Adelisa Selimbašić (b. 1996 Karlsruhe, Germany) is an Italian-Bosnian artist living and working in Brooklyn. She holds a master’s degree in painting from the Venice Academy of Fine Arts. Her practice draws from collective spaces like dance floors and nightclubs, where identity shifts through movement, sound, and physical closeness. A residency at Fridman Gallery in Beacon, New York, brought her to the United States in 2023.