The art plunder and destruction accompanying the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria together with increasing calls to decolonize museums and recent developments in the restitution of Nazi-looted art have brought about renewed attention to the role of artworks in armed conflict. While the majority of these inquiries highlight the capacity of art and heritage to mobilize memory and to serve as conduits for historical justice, this presentation examines them as sites at which forgetting is established materially, conceptually and legally. Taking as its point of departure her ongoing research on the ways in which art expropriated in episodes of state violence against non-Muslims in the late Ottoman Empire and the early Turkish republic has shaped the writing of (post-)Ottoman art history, Banu Karaca's presentation traces how the material conditions of forgetting have been reproduced through (art) historical narratives and archival practices that are unable to capture the stories of lost, displaced and dispossessed art. The second part of the talk focuses on how the “present absence” of dispossessed art is mirrored in the legal realm. It shows how art dispossessed in the late Ottoman Empire and the early Turkish republic falls through the cracks of existing provisions against crimes against humanity, war crimes, and the conventions on looted art that have been elaborated by UNESCO and the EU. In doing so it dwells on the persistent contradictions, blind spots and the codification of forgetting that characterize legal provisions intended to safeguard art and heritage in times of war and violence.