Hande Sever (b. Hande Lara Sever, 1990) is an 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. Grounded in theories of sovereignty and necropolitics, her lens-based practice interrogates the ways in which historical narratives are shaped and manipulated, particularly in the context of military violence, surveillance, and censorship. Often drawing from her family’s history of persecution, she explores the intersection of personal and collective memory, uncovering how visual culture is used to both erase and construct historical narratives.

Sever’s work has been exhibited internationally at the Hauser & Wirth in Somerset (2018); Museum für Angewandte Kunst in Vienna (2021); Czong Institute for Contemporary Art in Seoul (2021); Georg Kolbe Museum in Berlin (2025); Wereldmuseum in Amsterdam (2025); REDCAT: Roy and Edna Disney CalArts Theater (2025) and the Wende Museum of the Cold War (2025) in Los Angeles, among others. Her works have been reviewed in Hyperallergic, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and Artillery Magazine. Sever’s work has been supported through travel and production grants from the Félix González-Torres Foundation, the Eidolon Center for Everyday Photography, the Allianz Foundation, the Suraj Israni Center for Cinematic Arts, the SAHA Association and the Hrant Dink Foundation. She is a recipient of the 2021 Individual Artist Fellowship from the California Arts Council and the 2024 Art Writers Grant from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. She has been a Post-MFA artist in residence at Hauser & Wirth (2018) and a Pressing Matter artist in residence at the Rijksakademie (2024), alongside residencies at Human Resources Los Angeles (2021), SOMA Mexico (2023), and Kulturakademie Tarabya (2024), Institute of Contemporary Art Yerevan (2026).

Sever’s writing spans the visual cultures of modern and contemporary West Asia and its diasporas, colonial studies, and traditions of materialist thought, bringing these frameworks to bear on the cultural politics of the region. Her theoretical research explores critical questions surrounding state power and social resistance, investigating the dynamics of authoritarianism and its intersections with visual culture in the context of state violence. Through these lenses, she examines how visual culture both reflects and challenges broader socio-political narratives. Sever’s essays and interviews on art, architecture, and public space have been published or are forthcoming in the Oxford Art Journal, Getty Research Journal, World Art, Stedelijk Studies, Public Art Dialogue, MARCH: A Journal of Art and Strategy, X-TRA Contemporary Art Quarterly, Contemporary Art Review Los Angeles, frieze, as well as in the edited volume Perspectives on In/stability (Art Institute of Chicago, 2022) and the exhibition catalogue A Discourse through Time: The Photographs of Ursula Schulz-Dornburg (J. Paul Getty Museum, 2026). She is part of the editorial collective of FIELD: A Journal of Socially Engaged Criticism, and is a PhD candidate in the Art History, Theory, and Criticism program with a concentration in Art Practice at the University of California San Diego.