Abigail Raphael Collins: BLACKOUT / Hande Sever: Take off your eyes

The Roy and Edna Disney CalArts Theater (REDCAT) presents Hande Sever: Take off your eyes and Abigail Raphael Collins: BLACKOUT, two solo exhibitions by LA-based artists examining the role of visual media in shaping memories and imagining of global conflict.

Abigail Raphael Collins: BLACKOUT
Abigail Raphael Collins uses video installation and experimental nonfiction to listen to what is considered unspeakable. Her work begins from a queer, feminist perspective, exploring what is passed on through generations, outside of language: the gaps, silences, and stutters in intimate and historical dialogue. The culmination of eight years of researching, filming, and editing, BLACKOUT (2017-2025) is an experimental documentary that unravels relationships between the film and television industry and the US military. Beginning with the artist’s father, a method actor with PTSD frequently cast in military roles, BLACKOUT threads together interviews of individuals working at the mediatized military junction: a combat videographer, a role player for military trainings, a script supervisor in the Army, and a writer for a TV show partially funded by the US military.

Hande Sever: Take off your eyes
Hande Sever (CalArts Art MFA ‘18) explores cultural and political archives by excavating texts and images that shape historical narratives. Often drawing from her own family’s history of persecution, her work examines the intersection of personal and collective memory, particularly in the context of military violence, surveillance, and censorship. Take off your eyes presents two bodies of work rooted in Southern California collections. To Thread Air (2023) is based on research Sever conducted in the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library & Museum. Stemming from an album held in the Ottoman Empire photography collection of the Getty Research Institute, In Search of ‘My Beloved Pauline’ (2025) follows the path of a German soldier who documented sites of colonization throughout and beyond the Ottoman Empire.

Artist-led walkthroughs
June 7, 1pm: Hande Sever
July 19, 1pm: Abigail Raphael Collins

Lecture-performance by Hande Sever 
June 20, 7:30pm

Workshop led by Abigail Raphael Collins
June 21, 1–3pm

Abigail Raphael Collins: BLACKOUT and Hande Sever: Take off your eyes are curated by Daniela Lieja Quintanar, Chief Curator and Deputy Director, Programs, and Talia Heiman, Assistant Curator.

The Roy and Edna Disney CalArts Theater (REDCAT) is a multidisciplinary center for innovative visual and performing art founded by the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) in the Walt Disney Concert Hall complex in downtown Los Angeles. REDCAT continues the tradition of CalArts by encouraging experimentation, discovery and lively civic discourse.