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.
Çiçek İlengiz
Postdoctoral Researcher
+49 (0)30 89001 441
cicek.ilengiz(at)trafo-berlin.de
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Zoya Masoud
Postdoctoral Researcher
+49 (0)30 89001 428
zoya.masoud(at)trafo-berlin.de
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Elif Yılmaz Şentürk
Associate Member
elif.yilmaz(at)marmara.edu.tr
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Loes Hendriks
Student Assistant
February 2023 - March 2025
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.
Recent Publications
Banu Karaca, “Die Eigentümlichkeit der Kunst: Kulturelles Erbe und die Paradoxien des Schützens”, in: Paradoxien des Schützens: Schutzkonzepte und ihre Widersprüche, Dietrich Reimer Verlag, Berlin, 2025, pp. 55–69, https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15464324
Zoya Masoud, “Dislocation”, in: Dis:Connectivity in Processes of Globalisation: Concepts, Terms and Practices, eds. Christopher Balme, Burcu Dogramaci and Roland Wenzlhuemer, De Gruyter, 2025, pp. 93-99 (peer-reviewed). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111600345-013
Çiçek İlengiz with Cook et al., “Empathy and Dialogue: Embracing the Art of Creative Review,” In: Anthropology and Humanism, Volume 49, Issue 2, pp. 88-92, December 2024, https://doi.org/10.1111/anhu.12536
Conversation Series
Restitution and its Vantage Points: Beyond the Preservation Paradigm
1 Dec 2025, 5 pm | Chiara de Cesari (University of Amsterdam): Creative (Trans)Institutionalism: Experiments with Return, Restitution and Repair from the ‘Pressing Matter’ Project, Chair: Banu Karaca (BEYONDREST / Forum Transregionale Studien), This event is also part of the Berliner Seminar and takes place at Forum Transregionale Studien, Berlin and via Zoom. Registration and Zoomlink → here.
29 Oct 2025, 5 pm | Wendy Shaw (Independent Researcher): Power to the Poetry: Floating Feathers of How to Exhibit Islamically, Chair: Çiçek Ilengiz (BEYONDREST / Forum Transregionale Studien).
25 June 2025, 4 pm | Alia Mossallam (EUME Fellow 2017-25): When the Subaltern is Forced to Speak: Colonial Knowledge Production Projects, Their Afterlives and the Im/Possibility of Historical Justice. The Case of the Berlin Lautarchiv, Chair: Banu Karaca (PI BEYONDREST)
4 June 2025, 5 pm | Zoya Masoud (BEYONDREST): Dislocation and Heritage: On Radical Hope and Experiences of Loss in Aleppo/Syria, Chair: Çiçek İlengiz (BEYONDREST)
04 Dec 2024, 3 pm | Displacing to Preserve: (Dis)Possession and the Politics of Heritage in Egypt - film screening of Areej – Scent of Revolution by Viola Shafik, followed by a conversation with Banu Karaca and Çiçek İlengiz
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)