Violent Possessions: Art, Cultural Heritage, and the Politics of Knowledge
Banu’s ongoing research in the framework of BEYONDREST examines how art dispossessed in episodes of state violence against non-Muslims in the late Ottoman Empire and the early Turkish republic has shaped the knowledge production on (post-)Ottoman heritage and the writing of art history. Concentrating on the Armenian genocide, the wealth tax (1942), the pogrom of September 6-7, 1955, and the 1964 exiling of more than 12,000 Greek-Orthodox residents, mainly from Istanbul, the research shows how in the course of the symbolic, material and economic dispossession that accompanied and fuelled these episodes of state violence, artworks were looted, confiscated, or made illegible. While art is often regarded as a form of expression that has the capacity to mobilize memory, Violent Possessions focuses on art, heritage and their institutional worlds as sites at which forgetting is established and maintained, that is organized, materially, legally, and discursively. It follows the traces of dispossessed art in Turkey and rereads selected diasporic art archives and collections in Europe and the U.S. Rather than solely ascertaining current location or ownership, this search for “lost” art presents an avenue to contemplate the workings of epistemic remembering and forgetting in the dominant taxonomies of art and heritage and to approach provenance research as a kind of open-ended memory work. Violent Possessions conceptualizes restitution not as an endpoint to mend loss and dispossession but as a starting point to transform the ways in which knowledge on art and heritage is made. As such this research project is also a inquiry into what such knowledge-making might look like outside of the paradigm of possession.
2019-2022
Lost, Not Found? Violence, Dispossession, and the Re-Collecting of Post-Ottoman Art Histories
This research project centers on episodes of state violence against non-Muslims in the late Ottoman Empire and the early Turkish Republic. Different kinds of symbolic, material and economic dispossession were part of these episodes of state violence, in the course of which artworks were looted, confiscated, or made illegible. Based on archival research, oral histories, expert interviews, and examinations of the laws that have governed moveable heritage and art in the late Ottoman Empire, Turkey, and the international arena, this project asks: How has the material absence or misattribution of dispossessed artworks shaped the writing of art history, understandings of art, and the art world in Turkey and beyond? Following the traces of dispossessed art in Turkey and rereading diasporic art archives and collections in the U.S., this research also examines alternate forms of connectivity that have been lost through state violence. Rather than solely ascertaining their current location or ownership, this search for ‘lost’ art presents an avenue to contemplate the dynamics of remembering and forgetting in the knowledge production of art. Together with art looted by the Nazi regime, during colonial times, and the art plunder accompanying current wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, this research suggests that the dispossession of art presents neither an aberration nor a practice of a distant past but is constitutive to the art world and its institutions.
2016/ 2017
Lost, not Found? Missing Provenance, ‘Lost’ Works, and the Writing of Art History in Turkey
Tentatively entitled “Lost, not Found? Missing Provenance, ‘Lost’ Works, and the Writing of Art History in Turkey”, this project aims to account for the phenomenon of missing provenance in Turkey. Although this lack is often attributed to “belated modernization”, Karaca proposes that missing provenance has to be understood within the context of different kinds of symbolic, material and economic dispossession that are deeply intertwined with the history of art and its institutions. Tracing the circulation of late Ottoman and early republican painting through ethnographic interviews and archival work, it focuses on the conceptual and practical obstacles that provenance research faces in Turkey today. Part of this inquiry is developing a better understanding of how collections categorized as Islamic or Ottoman art encapsulate or exclude non-Muslim producers – and how such taxonomies in turn have impacted the writing of (Ottoman) art history in Turkey. Central to this research is the assumption that, with missing provenance, we also loose the stories of artists, collectors and audiences – all of which are vital in our understanding of art historical trajectories. Rather than solely tracing current location or ownership, this research project proposes to see works of art as both cultural memory and historical witnesses.