Hande Sever’s “Kuzgun Acar: Forms of Defiance” will map how the pioneering scrap-metal work of Ethiopian Turkish artist Kuzgun Acar (1928–1976)—long neglected in art historical scholarship and later destroyed by Turkish junta governments—anticipated new materialist approaches in contemporary art.
Hande Sever is a writer and research-based artist living in Los Angeles and orginally from Istanbul. Grounded in theories of sovereignty and necropolitics, Sever’s research interrogates the ways in which historical narratives are shaped and manipulated, particularly in the contexts of military violence, surveillance, and censorship. Her writing has appeared in publications including FIELD: A Journal of Socially Engaged Criticism, frieze, Getty Research Journal, MARCH: A Journal of Art and Strategy, Public Art Dialogue, Stedelijk Studies, and X-TRA, and in the edited collection Perspectives on In/stability (Art Institute of Chicago, 2022).