Hande Şekerciler was born in 1982 in Bursa, Turkey. She 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. Şekerciler credits her influences as artworks of the Hellenistic and Renaissance periods. Artworks from these periods act as a stimulus from which she experiments ideas of form and social issues through her sculpture. The nude sculpted figures in Ecstasy 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 combine classical forms with contemporary production methods.
Hande 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. Furthermore, Şekerciler was awarded the Residency Unlimited in New York.
