A Fine Art

With Her Arresting, Insistent Oeuvre, Sevdaliza Lets Her Songs and Videos Speak for Themselves.

- Alexandra Pollard

Sevdaliza is a shape-shifter. Before you can get a grasp of who the singer-songwriter is, she’s morphed into another character. In her song

“Marilyn Monroe,” off her upcoming debut album, ISON, she’s a fractured, fragile woman trying to put herself before others; in the visuals for “Human,” she’s a two-legged centaur dancing for a group of sweating men, insisting that she is flesh, bones, skin, and soul; in “Amandine Insensible,” she’s portrayed as a blank-faced model, available to purchase on Shutterstock, “performing your preferred daily routine.” Her posts on social media are unfailingly cryptic, and her biography on Facebook simply reads, “I’m everything you want me to be.” And yet, when I suggest that she deliberately cultivates an air of mystery, the look on her face is one of mild horror.

We’re in a French café in North London. Before the Iran-born, Netherlands-raised singer swept in, wearing an oversize green fur coat and with jet black hair down to her waist, it was completely empty—so there’s no thrum of chatter to hide the few seconds of confounded silence. Have I got it wrong? “Yeah!” she finally responds. “Because I honestly think that I’m just…not one thing. I think you take away from the experience if you tell people what to think. It’s not that I want to have mystery, it’s just that I’m very interested in how you perceive what I do.”