Hande Sever

Wende Museum | Culver City, USA

SAHA supports Hande Lara Sever’s new project intitled Specters of the Red Woodstock at Wende Museum between 8 November 2025 – 12 April 2026.

Commissioned as part of the Wende Museum’s former East German guardhouse project, research-based artist Hande Sever’s installation Specters of the Red Woodstock (2025) examines the surveillance of the International Youth Festivals—large-scale gatherings of artists, writers, and political activists—held in the former German Democratic Republic (GDR) in 1951 and 1973. Among the attendees were activist Angela Davis, novelist Pablo Neruda, and poet Nâzım Hikmet, whose presences signaled broader solidarities among anti-imperialist cultural movements. Drawing on recently declassified documents from the CIA’s Historical Collections, the project traces the surveillance trail that followed delegates to the 1951 and 1973 festivals. (…)By reframing declassified intelligence documents within an installation context, Sever meditates on the spectral afterlives of political gatherings that were both utopian and tightly surveilled. 

Hande Sever (1990) is a writer and research-based artist from Istanbul whose work explores the excavation of lost texts and distant images, examining how their production and dissemination inform historical revisionism and shape archival practices. Grounded in theories of sovereignty, Sever's research interrogates the ways in which historical narratives are shaped and manipulated. Her lens-based practice explores the intersection of personal and collective memory, uncovering how visual culture is used to both erase and construct historical narratives.

About Wende Museum

Founded in 2002, the Wende is an art museum, cultural center, and historical archive that match-makes collections with contemporary artists to help us see the world through new and fresh perspectives. The Wende promotes rigorous scholarship, innovative exhibitions and programming, and community services that provide creative practitioners with opportunities to make sense of recent history alongside current events. The Wende’s exhibitions, curated by Chief Curator Joes Segal and Associate Curator Emma Diffley along with collaborating scholars, artists, and curators, bridge the Cold War past to the present and invite contemporary artists to consider history in responding to topical questions and concerns in our era of closing borders, increasing nationalism, changing world orders, and climate change.