Holding and Disappearing Traces of the Past

Lara Fresko Madra explores Hande Sever’s recent installation at REDCAT in Los Angeles.

By Lara Fresko Madra November 25, 2025

• Art & Architecture

FRAME, SCAFFOLD, SCALE, DETAIL. These are the formal operations Hande Sever’s solo exhibition at REDCAT, Take off your eyes, brought to archival photographs to tease out the absences generated by historically hegemonic image economies: in one instance, German imperial/archaeological photography, and in another, Hollywood’s relation to the military-industrial complex. The exhibition, which ran from May 22 through August 10, principally comprised two installations made of wooden beams, which housed photographs.

In Search of ‘My Beloved Pauline’ (2024), installed in an L-shape at the junction of two walls, consists of 10 frames, each containing one to five photographs. The frames are arranged at different heights on a scaffolding structure with four horizontal bars, much like a farm fence. (An overzealous reading might find the structure suggestive of a sheet-music stave, where the frames become notes to a tune.) Upon close inspection, demanded by the small size of the photographs, it becomes noticeable that there are at least two sets of images, taken over a century apart, at times capturing the same place. One set, we learn from an accompanying text, is the product of a heavyweight three-legged camera transported by a German military officer traveling through the Ottoman Empire in 1917–18 along the path of what would become the Berlin–Baghdad railway. Originally taken with the intention of sending to a love interest back home, the titular Pauline, the photographs are crisp and black-and-white. The images in the second set are in color, taken by the artist as she retraced the footsteps of this unnamed officer a century later.

One of the frames contains a single photograph from the color series, a detail on a building’s facade. We see the street number and three letters in Armenian script carved into stone (clueing us in to who its owners or builders might have been) and the cropped corner of a pink shop sign on which one can discern the Turkish words for “birthday” and “engagement,” as well as “mevlüt” (an Islamic wake, signaling another cultural particularity here). The photograph has a collage-like quality: the top half shows the stone facade in its natural gray scale, while bubblegum pink fills the bottom. The contrast reflects the inevitable palimpsest of the old world. However, in the context of the aftermath of the Armenian genocide, which began in 1915, it carries an additional weight, reflecting how material culture simultaneously holds and disappears traces of the past. This single image works as the key to the rest: throughout the other frames, photographs variously juxtapose scenes of deterioration, overgrowth, development, and progress (the kind Walter Benjamin famously describes, in his 1940 essay “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” as a storm that piles up rubble in its wake, making it impossible to save anything).

Sourced from the Getty Research Institute, the black-and-white images, according to Sever, capture “significant events such as the Armenian genocide in Şebinkarahisar, the smuggling of Anatolian archaeological artifacts in Değirmentaş, and the construction of the Baghdad Railway in Ulukışla.” Yet as many authors (Giorgio Agamben, Ariella Azoulay, and Georges Didi-Huberman come to mind) have argued, there is no one image that can testify to genocide. The tension born out of contrast, within a single image or between the two sets of photographs, articulates not only what is lost (built environments that have crumbled, towns that were emptied out and destroyed, the central train station in Istanbul scaffolded for renovation after a fire) but also what replaced and covered up that loss (a badminton net, new settlements, a coat of paint).

The second installation, To Thread Air (2023), is likewise held together by scaffolding, supporting 16 vertically narrow frames made out of dark walnut. In contrast to the other installation, these are arranged single-file in pristine order—what in Turkish one might call military order (asker sırası). Each frame holds a single black-and-white photograph. Anyone who has been to Istanbul will recognize the landmarks: a stadium across from an Ottoman palace overlooking the Bosphorus; a cultural center named after Turkey’s founding father, which has been rebuilt twice (once after a fire in 1970, and more recently under President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in an attempt to harness its cultural importance for political hegemony); police barricades in a public park (likely the 2013 Gezi Park protests); and the facade of the Istanbul Manifaturacılar Çarşısı (the modernist fabric market across the Golden Horn from the other landmarks, boasting one of the most famous public sculptures by Kuzgun Acar). It is this last one that awakened me to the absence (or tenuous presence) of public sculptures in the other images, in particular the civic sculptures of the 1970s, commissioned on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the republic by the center-left party then in power, which were destroyed, removed, or left to fall into disrepair following the 1980 coup led by right-wing nationalist Kenan Evren.

An accompanying audiovisual work, installed on the wall beside the row of frames, weaves together archival photographs and video to demonstrate the ideological and strategic kinship between Evren and his contemporary, US president Ronald Reagan. The voice-over narration emphasizes their anticommunism and legacies of violence, but perhaps more compellingly, Sever unearths their shared investment in and requisitioning of the arts. Reagan, previously a film actor and the president of the Screen Actors Guild, Sever recounts, “had worked as an informant for the FBI and blacklisted 50 actors and actresses.” Evren, who took an interest in visual art upon retirement (as George W. Bush would after his own presidency ended), often painted landscapes and trees. Sever’s voice-over remarks that such depictions “unintentionally represen[t] subjects he dominated, as trees were a common metaphor for activists and protesters, especially those that were murdered by the 1980 military coup.”

The video’s collaged narrative and soundscape offer the contextual cues of the 1980s that annotate and animate the beautifully nuanced references in the rest of the installation. For example, the walnut frames (their lean dimensions apparently based on the paper size of the 1980 coup declaration) are a reference to Cem Karaca’s revolutionary “Ceviz Ağacı” (“Walnut Tree”), an Anatolian rock anthem based on a poem by Nâzım Hikmet. Though these works may easily be filed under research-based art and archival practice, there is a formal rigor through which intricate details amass into layered stories. The cascading historical resonance between the 1910s, the 1980s, and our present moment, saturated by images of man-made devastation, crystallize the antecedents and aftermaths of a global rightward tide.

¤

Featured image: Hande Sever. From In Search of ‘My Beloved Pauline,’ 2024. Funded in part with generous support by the Eidolon Centre for Everyday Photography, the Allianz Foundation, and the Hrant Dink Foundation.