Handan Börüteçene works with a variety of materials, including glass spheres, tables, lenses, laurel, lithium, oars, gravel and seeds, to depict historical memory. Her art critically examines objects and their use, and the manipulative qualities of mass media.
After graduating from the Istanbul State Academy of Fine Arts’ ceramics department in 1981, H. Börüteçene continued her education at the École nationale supèrieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1984, taking courses at the sculpture studios of Georges Jeanclos (1933–1997) and César Baldaccini (1921–1998). Her childhood interest in archaeology, as well as her participation in the excavation of the ancient Greek site of Lycia in Turkey in 1980 at the invitation of Cevdet Bayburtluoğlu (1934–2013), the excavation’s director, strengthened her bond with this practice.

H. Börüteçene’s installation Against War (1983) was displayed at Paris’ 34th Salon de la jeune peinture. It consisted of a pair of military boots mounted on the wall, facing an arrangement of civilian and children’s shoes, gathered from acquaintances and flea markets. She later completed Break/See (1985) as her graduation project – one of her earliest pieces to invite audience intervention. The public is asked to break the tablet marked with the words ‘Break/See’ in Hittite script using boxwood mallets and thereby to see Anatolia’s layered historicity unfolding across centuries. In 1987 she opened her first solo exhibition in Turkey, The Army of Kitchen, at Urart Art Gallery. In the same year, her Mass Miscommunication Tools etc etc zzzz….bızzzz was shown at the first Istanbul Biennial. This work highlights the manipulative nature of communication and information.

The conceptual framework of H. Börüteçene’s practice is anchored in a curatorial reflex articulated through the act of writing – an integral component of her practice – which also forms the basis of her displays and works. Her site-specific installations at historical and archaeological sites reflect her intention to build bridges between the cultural layers addressed in her works and the contexts of these venues, such as her solo exhibition Pass Through Every Sea: Beyond is Silence and Secrecy at Istanbul’s Hagia Irene Church Museum in 1991 and Memory of the World in 1995 at the Ankara Museum of Civilisation.

H. Börüteçene has held exhibitions internationally, where she established various networks of interactions through objects. While these networks of relationships may occasionally encompass the story of an ironworker in a remote village, in a complex way, they can also reveal ecological destruction from a different perspective. She positions the surrounding trees, mountains, wind, soil and sea not as inanimate things, but as active agents, establishing a vertical rather than a linear temporality. Roaming through Istanbul Archaeological Museums, her piece I Remained Buried Within Myself (2014) creates a bridge between different historical periods. In Bring Me Yourself, an installation exhibited in 2009 at the Musée de l’histoire de l’immigration, Palais de la Porte Dorée in Paris, visitors interact with suitcases belonging to different historicities through magnifying glasses.

H. Börüteçene’s works are found in public and private collections, including Istanbul Museum of Modern Art, ARTER and the Ayşe Umur Collection. A comprehensive exhibition of her practice was presented at SALT Beyoğlu in Istanbul in 2023.