Hande Şekerciler

Hande Şekerciler (b. 1982, Bursa, Turkey) attended Marmara University, studying in the Department of Arts and Crafts Education from 1998 to 2002. 

Şekerciler is a sculptor renowned for her figurative forms, crediting her influences being artworks of the Hellenistic and Renaissance periods. These periods act as stimuli from which Şekerciler experiments with forms to explore social issues in her sculptural work. The nude sculpted figures from her Ecstasy series reject clothing, accessories, and even hair to remove them from gendered and societal labels. This so-called ‘purification’ is an attempt to create characters at “peace with their sexuality and orientation who embrace their existence”. Her interest in technology and new production techniques help her to add a contemporary edge to classical forms. 

Şekerciler is also running a side project, an artistic duo called ha:ar, with Arda Yalkin, where they search for ways of incorporating digital technology into traditional arts, merging the two to create a new meeting of aesthetics. Şekerciler was awarded the Residency Unlimited in New York in 2018.