ARTIST TALK: ARCHIVAL ARTISTIC PRACTICES WITH HANDE SEVER

ICA Yerevan is pleased to invite you to an artist talk with Hande Sever, a Los Angeles-based artist and writer whose works explore the excavation of lost texts and distant images, examining how their omission and dissemination inform historical revisionism and shape archival practices. 

As part of her talk, Hande will present her recent body of work examining German imperialism in West Asia before and during World War I. Drawing on the Anatolian and Baghdad Railway archives at Deutsche Bank’s Historical Institute, as well as a vernacular photo album titled ‘My Beloved Pauline in Memory of Turkey–Asia Minor 1917/18’, compiled by a German military officer during his deployment in the former Ottoman Empire, Sever traces the entanglements of infrastructure, war finance, and visual culture. The talk will feature her recent photo series In Search of “My Beloved Pauline” (2025), which centers on the album, alongside her ongoing project Under Clouds Smaller than a Man’s Hand (2027) focused on the railway archives which she will continue developing during her residency.

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Grounded in theories of sovereignty and necropolitics, Hande Sever’s lens-based practice interrogates the ways in which historical narratives are shaped and manipulated, particularly in the context of state violence, surveillance, and censorship. Often drawing from her family’s history of persecution, her lens-based practice explores the intersection of personal and collective memory, uncovering how visual culture is used to both erase and construct historical narratives. She is a recipient of the 2021 Individual Artist Fellowship from the California Arts Council and the 2024 Arts Writers Grant from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.

For more information about Hande Sever’s work, please visit handesever.org or instagram.com/handeforastra.