Hande Sever

Email:

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, as well as the 2026 University of California President’s Dissertation 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).