Hande Sever

Email:

hsever@ucsd.edu

Website:

https://www.handesever.org

Biography:

Hande Sever is a research-based artist and scholar from Istanbul whose work engages critically with theories of sovereignty and necropolitics. Her art-historical research examines modern and contemporary art as a site where state power becomes materially, spatially, and affectively legible through processes of commissioning, exhibition-making, and censorship. She analyzes how state violence operates not as an external intervention but as a constitutive force in the making, reception, and disappearance of artworks. Through these lenses, Sever traces how visual culture both reflects and contests broader socio-political formations. Her critical and scholarly writing has appeared in Oxford Art Journal, Getty Research Journal, FIELD: A Journal of Socially Engaged Art Criticism, frieze, MARCH: A Journal of Art and Strategy, Public Art Dialogue, Stedelijk Studies, X-TRA, and in the edited volume Perspectives on In/stability (The Art Institute of Chicago, 2022) as well as in the exhibition catalogue A Discourse through Time: The Photographs of Ursula Schulz-Dornburg (J. Paul Getty Museum, 2027). She was a 2023–2024 Sara Clarke Kaplan Predoctoral Fellow at UCSD’s Black Studies Project, a 2023–2024 Annette Merle-Smith Fellow at UCSD’s CARTA program at the Salk Institute, and the recipient of the University of California Humanities Research Institute's 2025 Dissertation Support Award. She is currently a 2025–2026 Visiting Scholar at the University of Southern California’s Center for Advanced Genocide Research.

Selected publications:

• “The Photographic Afterlives of Empires.” In A Discourse through Time: The Photographs of Ursula Schulz-Dornburg. Edited by Frances Terpak and Arpad Kovacs. Los Angeles, CA: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2027.
• “New Spatial Visions: Hadi Bara’s Critique of Architecture Formes Couleur.” Oxford Art Journal, Volume 49, issue 1 (March, 2026).
• “Empty Fields Revisited.” In Perspectives on In/stability. Edited by Delinda Collier and Robyn Farrell. Chicago, IL: The Art Institute of Chicago, 2022.
• “In Dialogue with Nails: Kuzgun Acar’s Elegy to a Modern Man.” World Art, no. 12 (August, 2022).