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 Army film production over documentary footage of male figures drawing before it cuts to a clip of an animated cartoon plane “learning” to fly. The short video is excerpted in Hande Sever’s multimedia artwork “To Thread Air” (2025), on view at REDCAT in her solo exhibition Take off your eyes. Across the show’s two installations, Sever mines archives of conquest and imperialism in her native Turkey — from the Armenian Genocide to the Ottoman Empire — to produce multifaceted displays that entangle violent histories with intimate, personal narratives. Undergirding her investigation is a firm attention to the ways that art and media shape our relationships to each other and to the nation state, in war and in peace.
Love meets war in “In Search of ‘My Beloved Pauline’” (2025), a sprawling installation that incorporates a photo album from 1917–18 that a German soldier stationed in Anatolia created for his girlfriend, Pauline. Casual black and white snapshots of Ottoman-era buildings, ruins, and landscapes are matted alongside Sever’s own photographic documentation, which follows the soldier’s same path more than a century later. Lingering within the project is a dark history: as noted in accompanying exhibition texts, the Armenian Genocide took place during the soldier’s tenure in West Asia, spearheaded by the Ottoman Empire and supported by Germany through both the military and financial investments. Sever’s narrow, confined depictions of Turkish landmarks — only slivers of architecture appear in her versions, which are more constrained than the soldier’s —emphasize how the original collection conceals more than it reveals.
“To Thread Air,” composed of a film essay and photo series, opts for a more didactic approach to similar material; the video work utilizes conventional voiceover narration to tell a digressive story about the intersection of war and art. The film takes the Cold War camaraderie between US President Ronald Reagan and right-wing Turkish dictator Kenan Evren, who spearheaded the country’s 1980 military coup, as its starting point, charting each controversial leader’s hypocritical approach to cultural production. One “thread” follows Reagan’s early career as an actor in American war propaganda films and his support of the Hollywood blacklist as president; another charts Evren’s removal of leftist art in Turkey, and his later career as a pastoral landscape painter. Footage that captures Reagan and Evren’s diplomatic friendship intersperses Sever’s montage, showcasing how interpersonal relationships shape and suppress media narratives.
Sever’s exhibition is installed on bare, unvarnished wood scaffolding. The provisional structures encourage viewers to look not only at the artwork, but also through it, searching for new connections between the past and present — and for what might be missing from any given photograph or video. The fragmented results carve out a new life for the artist’s historical material, weaving together stories and relationships that at first seem disparate —but that the artist proves are intricately, and intimately, connected.
Hande Sever: Take off your eyes continues at REDCAT (631 West 2nd Street, Downtown, Los Angeles) through August 10. The exhibition was curated by Daniela Lieja Quintanar and Talia Heiman.
