Beyond Restitution: Heritage, (Dis)Possession and the Politics of Knowledge (BEYONDREST)
Beyond Restitution: Heritage, (Dis)Possession and the Politics of Knowledge (BEYONDREST)
On the backdrop of ongoing debates to decolonialize museums, Beyond Restitution asks if the return of looted art can indeed be regarded as a closure of historical wounds. The project probes the focus on restitution that inadvertently casts dispossessed art in terms of contested property. Instead, it explores what kind of loss dispossessed art engenders, and how this loss has shaped the knowledge production on heritage. It focuses on the interlocution between Western Europe, the Near and Middle East, and North Africa, mapping relationships between people and “things” that have largely been left out of current restitution debates. The project starts in the mid-19th century, which witnessed the rise of the museum in its modern form as well as the violence unleashed by imperial and colonial projects and dispossession. Innumerable objects made their way into international collections, categorized mostly as “Islamic art,” or as the “universal heritage of humankind” that nonetheless symbolically and proprietarily belongs to the “West.” Beyond Restitution conceptualizes restitution not as an endpoint to mend loss and dispossession but as a starting point to transform the ways in which we make knowledge on art and heritage. The interdisciplinary research group is employing a wide methodologically matrix, including ethnographic interviews, visual analysis of exhibitions, archival research, and examinations of the laws governing cultural assets to capture the proprietary stakes in the interplay of epistemic remembering and forgetting. The research also extends to contemporary artistic approaches to dispossessed heritage as alternate paths of knowledge making in a field that has to contend with the impasses that arise when centering on what is absent rather than what is present, on what is lost, rather than found. Beyond Restitution argues that the dispossession of art is not merely a problematic of colonialism or empire, that is of the past, but an ongoing process that is constitutive for the governance of heritage in its national and transnational formations. It is a precondition for the ways in which art and other “cultural assets” circulate.
This five-year project is funded by the European Union (European Research Council (ERC), Project No. 101045661), hosted by the Forum Transregionale Studien (Forum), and related to EUME. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Research Council Executive Agency. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.
Elif Yılmaz Şentürk
Associate Member
elif.yilmaz(at)marmara.edu.tr
More information
Loes Hendriks
Student Assistant
February 2023 - March 2025
Special Issue of History & Anthropology
Beyond Preservation: Decolonizing the Conceptual Framework of Cultural Heritage
Banu Karaca and Çiçek İlengiz, Beyond Preservation: Decolonizing the Conceptual Framework of Cultural Heritage
Banu Karaca, Preserving to Forget: Ottoman-Armenian Art and the Politics of Museum Taxonomies
Çiçek İlengiz, Absented in Bergama, Preserved in Berlin: Towards a Reconceptualization of Archeological Preservation
Pascale Ghazaleh, Heritage Without People, Heritage Without Time: The Preservation Paradigm in Contemporary Egypt
Regina F. Bendix, Cardboard Boxes: The (In)visibility of Human Remains and Their Mobilizing Potential
Zoya Masoud, Host(ag)ed by the Institution: Digitization Between Heritage Preservation and Decolonization
Wendy M. K. Shaw, Power to the Poetry: Floating Feathers of how to Exhibit Islamically
Chiara De Cesari, Against Property: The Aporias of Preservation and the Problem with Decolonizing Heritage
More contributions following soon.
Recent Publications
Florence Potter, “All’s Well That Ends Well? A Visit to the Deutschlandmuseum”, in: TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research, 29.09.2026.
Banu Karaca, “When Evil is not Elsewhere and On Knowing Otherwise”, in: İz Öztat, Vorbei mit der Übeltäterei/Done with evil-doing, pp. 43-54. Germany, 2026.
Zoya Masoud, “Of Exclusive Victimhood and its Competitive Narratives in Post-Assad Syria", in: Focaalblog, 30 March 2026.
Zoya Masoud, “Architectures of Colonialism: Constructed Histories, Conflicting Memories”, in: Allegra Lab, February 2026.
Banu Karaca, “Die Eigentümlichkeit der Kunst: Kulturelles Erbe und die Paradoxien des Schützens”, in: Paradoxien des Schützens: Schutzkonzepte und ihre Widersprüche, eds. Leena Crasemann, Samantha Lutz and Theresa Müller, Dietrich Reimer Verlag, Berlin, 2025, pp. 55–69.
Blog Series Beyond Guidelines
The Question of Ethics in Transregional Research and Knowledge Production
Banu Karaca (PI BEYONDREST), Introducing “Beyond Guidelines”: Navigating Mismatched Expectations between Research Ethics and Institutional Ethics Regimes, in: TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research, 18.01.2024.
Birgit Meyer (Utrecht University), Doing Research Under Current Ethics Regimes: Some Observations, in: TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research, 08.02.2024.
Çiçek İlengiz (Postdoc BEYONDREST), When Off-the-Record Takes Over: Research Ethics under Authoritarianism, in: TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research, 29.02.2024.
Himmat Zoubi (EUME Fellow), Ethics of Listening to the Silence: Voices, Archives, and the Unspoken Past, in: TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research, 21.03.2024.
Jeremy F. Walton (University of Rijeka, Croatia), Poor Connections, in: TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research, 3.12.2024.
Conversation Series
Restitution and its Vantage Points: Beyond the Preservation Paradigm
30 June 2026, 4 pm | In Search of Reparative Justice: The Appropriation of Objects, Restitution Claims, and Artistic Approaches from Iraq. Zoya Masoud (BEYONDREST / Forum Transregionale Studien) in conversation with Nora Al-Badri (artist, Berlin), chaired by Niloufar Tajeri (UdK Berlin).
22 May 2026, 5 pm | Does the Future Last Forever? Justice and Temporalities in Turkey. Screening of "Hold Still" (Dargeçit) by Berke Baş, followed by a talk by Özgür Sevgi Göral (EHESS - CETOBaC), chaired by Nazan Maksudyan (Centre Marc Bloch/Freie Universität Berlin / EUME Fellow 2009/10)
19 Feb 2026, 4 pm | Marianna Hovhannisyan (Independent Researcher): Armenian Archival Imaginaries, Chair: Banu Karaca (BEYONDREST / Forum Transregionale Studien)
Workshops
3-4 Oct 2024 | BEYONDREST Workshop Beyond Property: Cultural Heritage, Ownership and the Making of Knowledge, Institut Français d’Études Anatoliennes (IFEA), Istanbul. Program (PDF)
28 Jun 2023 | BEYONDREST Workshop Beyond Guidelines: The Question of Ethics in Transregional Research and Knowledge Production, Forum Transregionale Studien, Berlin. Program (PDF)