LOS ANGELES — “The art department is one excellent example of how the arts of peace become the arts of war,” says the narrator of a United States Military movie manufacturing over documentary footage of male figures drawing earlier than it cuts to a clip of an animated cartoon airplane “learning” to fly. The brief video is excerpted in Hande Sever’s multimedia paintings “To Thread Air” (2025), on view at REDCAT in her solo exhibition Take off your eyes. Throughout the present’s two installations, Sever mines archives of conquest and imperialism in her native Turkey — from the Armenian Genocide to the Ottoman Empire — to provide multifaceted shows that entangle violent histories with intimate, private narratives. Undergirding her investigation is a agency consideration to the ways in which artwork and media form {our relationships} to one another and to the nation state, in warfare and in peace.
Love meets warfare in “In Search of ‘My Beloved Pauline’” (2025), a sprawling set up that comes with a photograph album from 1917–18 {that a} German soldier stationed in Anatolia created for his girlfriend, Pauline. Informal black and white snapshots of Ottoman-era buildings, ruins, and landscapes are matted alongside Sever’s personal photographic documentation, which follows the soldier’s identical path greater than a century later. Lingering throughout the mission is a darkish historical past: as famous in accompanying exhibition texts, the Armenian Genocide befell through the soldier’s tenure in West Asia, spearheaded by the Ottoman Empire and supported by Germany via each the army and monetary investments. Sever’s slim, confined depictions of Turkish landmarks — solely slivers of structure seem in her variations, that are extra constrained than the soldier’s —emphasize how the unique assortment conceals greater than it reveals.
Set up view of “To Thread Air” (2023), photograph set up, picket construction, video, in Hande Sever: Take off your eyes at REDCAT, Los Angeles (photograph Claudia Ross/Hyperallergic)
“To Thread Air,” composed of a movie essay and photograph sequence, opts for a extra didactic method to related materials; the video work makes use of typical voiceover narration to inform a digressive story concerning the intersection of warfare and artwork. The movie takes the Chilly Conflict camaraderie between US President Ronald Reagan and right-wing Turkish dictator Kenan Evren, who spearheaded the nation’s 1980 army coup, as its start line, charting every controversial chief’s hypocritical method to cultural manufacturing. One “thread” follows Reagan’s early profession as an actor in American warfare propaganda movies and his assist of the Hollywood blacklist as president; one other charts Evren’s removing of leftist artwork in Turkey, and his later profession as a pastoral panorama painter. Footage that captures Reagan and Evren’s diplomatic friendship intersperses Sever’s montage, showcasing how interpersonal relationships form and suppress media narratives.
Sever’s exhibition is put in on naked, unvarnished wooden scaffolding. The provisional buildings encourage viewers to look not solely on the paintings, but additionally via it, looking for new connections between the previous and current — and for what could be lacking from any given {photograph} or video. The fragmented outcomes carve out a brand new life for the artist’s historic materials, weaving collectively tales and relationships that in the first place appear disparate —however that the artist proves are intricately, and intimately, related.
Set up view of video in Hande Sever, “To Thread Air” (2023) (photograph Claudia Ross/Hyperallergic)
Hande Sever, “In Search of My Beloved ‘Pauline,’” element (2025) (photograph Claudia Ross/Hyperallergic)
Set up view of Hande Sever, “In Search of My Beloved ‘Pauline’” (2025) (photograph Claudia Ross/Hyperallergic)
Hande Sever, “To Thread Air,” element (2023) (courtesy the artist, photograph by Yubo Dong, ofstudio)
Hande Sever, “To Thread Air,” element (2023) (courtesy the artist, photograph by Yubo Dong, ofstudio)
Hande Sever: Take off your eyes continues at REDCAT (631 West 2nd Avenue, Downtown, Los Angeles) via August 10. The exhibition was curated by Daniela Lieja Quintanar and Talia Heiman.
