Banu Karaca (Principal Investigator BEYONDREST)

Banu Karaca (Principal Investigator BEYONDREST)

Banu Karaca works at the intersection of political anthropology and critical theory, art, aesthetics, and cultural policy, museum and feminist memory studies. She holds a PhD from the Graduate Center, The City University of New York. She has published on freedom of expression in the arts, the visualization of gendered memories of war and political violence, visual literacy, and restitution. She is the author of The National Frame: Art and State Violence in Turkey and Germany (Fordham University Press, 2021), and co-editor of Women Mobilizing Memory (Columbia University Press, 2019). In 2011, she co-founded Siyah Bant, a research platform that documented censorship in the arts in Turkey. She has been Visiting Assistant Professor of Cultural Studies at Sabancı University and Faculty Fellow at Columbia University’s Center for the Study of Social Difference. Her work has been supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Foundation for Arts Initiatives (FfAI), the ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry, Stiftung Mercator, and the Volkswagen Foundation, among others. She was a Fellow of Art Histories and Aesthetic Practices in 2015/16 and a Fellow of Europe in the Middle East—The Middle East in Europe (EUME) in 2016/17 and 2019-2022, both research programs at the Forum Transregionale Studien. In April 2023, Banu Karaca was Aron Rodrigue International Visitor at the Stanford Humanities Center. Banu Karaca has been awarded a Consolidator Grant by the European Research Council for her project Beyond Restitution: Heritage, (Dis)Possession and the Politics of Knowledge (BEYONDREST). 

 

E-Mail 
banu.karaca(at)trafo-berlin.de

Phone
 +49 (0)30 89001 426

Research Field(s)
Political Anthropology, Critical Theory, Art, Aesthetics, Cultural Policy, Museum Studies, Feminist Memory Studies

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.

Profile Picture Banu Karaca
Photo by Üzüm Derin Solak

Selected Publications:

“When Evil is not Elsewhere and On Knowing Otherwise”, in: İz Öztat, Vorbei mit der Übeltäterei/Done with evil-doing, pp. 43-54. Germany, https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20006954

“Die Eigentümlichkeit der Kunst: Kulturelles Erbe und die Paradoxien des Schützens”, in: Paradoxien des Schützens: Schutzkonzepte und ihre Widersprüche, ers. Leena Crasemann, Samantha Lutz and Theresa Müller, Dietrich Reimer Verlag, Berlin, 2025, pp. 55–69, https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15464324

“The materialities and legalities of forgetting. Dispossession and the making of Turkey’s (post-)Ottoman heritage,” in: Islam and Heritage in Europe Pasts, Presents and Future Possibilities, ed. by Katarzyna Puzon, Sharon Macdonald, Mirjam Shatanawi, London, Routledge 2021, pp. 145-160, https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003044789 

All Publications:

Books

2021 The National Frame: Art and State Violence in Turkey and Germany. New York: Fordham University Press.

2019 Women Mobilizing Memory: Arts of Intervention, co-edited with Marianne Hirsch, Jean 
Howard, Ayşe Gül Altinay, María José Contreras, and Alisa Solomon. New York: Columbia University Press.

 

Journal Articles 

2021 “Silence, the Unsayable, and Memory,” Response to Umut Yıldırım’s “Spaced-Out States Decolonizing Trauma in a War-Torn Middle Eastern City,” Current Anthropololgy 62(6): 272-273. https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/718206 

2020 “Art, Dispossession, and Imaginations of Justice: Thinking with the Works of Maria Eichhorn and Dilek Winchester,” Critical Times: Interventions in Global Critical Theory 3(2). https://doi.org/10.1215/26410478-8517727 

2019 “Bir Tuhaf Mülkiyet: Türkiye’de Sanat ve Mülksüzleştirme [A Strange Kind of Property: Art and Dispossession in Turkey],” Ayrıntı Dergi 2019(32): 82-87.

2015 “The Myth of Unfamiliarity,” L’Internationale Online, April 25, http://www.internationaleonline.org/research/real_democracy/19_the_myth_of_unfamiliarity

2013 “Suspending the Limits of the Sayable…” Cultural Anthropology, Fieldsights - Hot Spots, http://www.culanth.org/fieldsights/402-suspending-the-limits-of-the-sayable 

2012 “Türkiye’ de Güncel Sanat ve Sansür Politikalari [Contemporary Artistic Production and the Politics of Censorship in Turkey],” Toplum ve Bilim 125: 134-151. 

2011 “Images delegitimized and discouraged: Explicitly Political Art and the Arbitrariness of the Unspeakable,” New Perspectives on Turkey 45: 155-184.

2011 When Duty Calls…: Questions of Sensitivity and Responsibility in Light of the Tophane Events. Red Thread e-journal (November 2011); http://www.red-thread.org/en/article.asp?a=49 [Also published in Turkish].

2010 “The Art of Integration: Probing the Role of Cultural Policy in the Making of Europe,” International Journal of Cultural Policy 16(2): 1-17. 

2009 “Governance of or through Culture? Cultural Policy and the Politics of Culture in Europe,” Focaal–European Journal of Anthropology 55: 27-40.

2008 Politik Olanı Çarpıtmak...Kültür politikaları sanatın algılanışını nasıl belirler. [Deflecting the Political…How Cultural Policy Frames the Reception of Art.] art-ist 7: 98-101.

 

Book Chapters 

2025 “Die Eigentümlichkeit der Kunst: Kulturelles Erbe und die Paradoxien des Schützens [The Peculiarity of Art: Cultural Heritage and the Paradoxes of Protection].” In: Paradoxien des Schützens: Schutzkonzepte und ihre Widersprüche [The Paradoxes of Protection: Concepts of Protection and their Contradictions], edited by Leena Crasemann, Samantha Lutz, Theresa Müller (Berlin: Reimer), 55-69.

2023 “Bir Tuhaf Mülkiyet: Türkiye’de Sanat ve Mülksüzleştirme [A strange Kind of Property: Art and Dispossession in Turkey].” In: Mülkiyet ve Müşterekler: Türkiye’de Mülkiyetin İnşası, İcrası ve İhlali [Property and the Commons: The Construction, Implementation and Violation of Property in Turkey], edited by Begüm Özden Fırat ve Fırat Genç (Istanbul: Metis), 267-280.

2021 “The Materialities and Legalities of Forgetting: Dispossession and the Making of (Post-) Ottoman Art and Heritage.” In Islam and Heritage in Europe: Past Developments and Future Possibilities, edited by Katarzyna Puzon, Sharon Macdonald and Mirjam Shatanawi, 145-160. London: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003044789

2021 “Histories of Ongoing Violence: Complicity and Implicatedness.” In Memory and Art, edited by Eylem Ertürk and Sevim Sancaktar, 59-65. Istanbul: Hafiza Merkezi.

2019 “When Everything has been said before..: Dispossession and the Politics of Art in Turkey.” In Women Mobilizing Memory: Arts of Intervention, edited by Ayşe Gül Altinay, María José Contreras Marianne Hirsch, Jean Howard, Banu Karaca and Alisa Solomon, 285-302.New York: Columbia University Press.

2019 “Reordering the World.” In Özlem Günyol & Mustafa Kunt, edited by Çiçek Öztek, 34-41. Istanbul: Dirimart. 

2017 “Visual Literacy.” In Gender: War! Macmillan Interdisciplinary Handbooks, edited by Andrea Peto, renée c. hoogland, Nicole Fleetwood and Iris van der Tuin, 349-62. New York: Macmillan Reference.

2016 Unsettling Accounts: Fictionalizing and Visualizing Gendered Memories. In Gendered Wars, Gendered Memories: Feminist Conversations on War, Genocide and Political Violence, edited by Ayşe Gül Altinay and Andrea Peto, 181-88. Abingdon and New York: Routledge.

2013 “Europeanization from the Margins? Istanbul’s Cultural Capital Initiative and the Formation of European Cultural Policies.” In The Cultural Politics of Europe, edited by Kiran Klaus Patel, 157-175. Abingdon and New York: Routledge.

2010 “The Politics of Urban Arts Events: A Comparison of Istanbul and Berlin,” in Orienting Istanbul: Cultural Capital of Europe?, edited by Deniz Göktürk, Levent Soysal and Ipek Türeli, pp. 234-250. Abingdon and New York: Routledge [Also published in Turkish by Metis].

2009 “On Practices of Cultural Exchange,” in Sourcebook Istanbul, 14-25. Berlin: Senatskanzlei für kulturelle Angelegenheiten.

 

Cultural Policy and Arts Freedom Reports

2025 Universal Periodic Review (UPR) of Turkey at the UN Human Rights Commission, commissioned by Article 19, joint submission by Susma and Freemuse

2024 Universal Periodic Review (UPR) of Turkey at the UN Human Rights Commission, commissioned by Article 19, joint submission by Susma and Freemuse

2019 Universal Periodic Review (UPR) of Turkey at the UN Human Rights Commission, commissioned by Article 19, joint submission by Susma and Freemuse.

2018 “New Paradigms for International Relations,” Cultures of We, Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen (IFA).

2017 “Archives and Erasure in Turkey,” Index on Censorship (April 2017).

2014 Universal Periodic Review (UPR) of Turkey at the UN Human Rights Commission, with Freemuse and the Initiative for Freedom of Expression on freedom of the arts in Turkey.

2014 “International Exhibition censored by Turkish Embassy in Madrid,” with Pelin Başaran. Index on Censorship (May 2014); http://www.indexoncensorship.org/2014/05/international-exhibition-censored-turkish-embassy-madrid/

2014 “Artists engaged in Kurdish rights struggle face limits of free expression.” Index on Censorship (February 2014); http://www.indexoncensorship.org/2014/02/freedom-of-expression-in-the-arts-and-censorship-in-kurdish-region-diyarbakir-batman/

2014 “Cultural policy effects on freedom of expression in Turkey.” Index on Censorship (February 2014); http://www.indexoncensorship.org/2014/02/developments-cultural-policy-effects-freedom-arts-ankara

2013 Sanatta İfade Özgürlüğü, Sansür ve Hukuk [Freedom of Expression in the Arts, Censorship and the Law], co-edited with Pelin Başaran and Asena Günal. Siyah Bant 2. 

2012 Devlet sansürü ve devletin anonim vekilleri [Censorship and the Anonymous Proxies of the State]. Siyah Bant 1: 9-18.

 

Interviews, Podcasts, Arts Writing (selected)

2024 Sanatın Yerinden Edilmesi [The Displacement of Art], with Hera Büyüktaşcıyan as part of the series “Apelasis 1964 and Beyond” on the exiling of the Rum population of Istanbul in 1964 https://open.spotify.com/episode/6wKrv2wWTAjMvcwSYdQqBB?si=a3ce6a7c16074ae6

2024 “Hamilerin aklama, saklama, unutturma taklaları [Attempts to whitewash, hide and make us forget],” Bir+Bir Express, https://birartibir.org/hamilerin-aklama-saklama-unutturma-taklalari/ 

2023 “Looking for Love in all (the Right and Wrong) Places,” in Life, Death, Love, and Justice, 

edited by Fisun Yalçınkaya (Istanbul: Yapı Kredi Yayınları), 130-143.

2021 New Texts Out Now: Banu Karaca, The National Frame: Art and State Violence in Turkey and Germany, Jadaliyya, https://www.jadaliyya.com/Details/43221/Banu-Karaca,-The-National-Frame-Art-and-State-Violence-in-Turkey-and-Germany-Fordham-University-Press,-2021

2021 The National Frame, TRAFO - Blog for Transregional Research,

2021 Author Q&A, The National Frame, https://www.combinedacademic.co.uk/blog/2021/03/24/banu-karaca-the-national-frame/

2021 Devlet şiddetiyle şekillenen sanat dünyası [An Art World Shaped by State Violence], Argonotlar, https://argonotlar.com/devlet-siddetiyle-sekillenen-sanat-dunyasi/ 

2021 Sanat Dünyası ve Huzursuzlukları [The Art World and its Discontents], KIRIK, https://kirik.online/en/the-art-world-and-its-discontents/ 

2021 “Spotlight,” public art project by Huo Rf, http://www.huorf.com/#/spotlight/

2020 “To Remember Differently…” Contribution to the exhibition "The Futureless Memory" conceived by Dilek Winchester and curated by Katja Schroeder at Kunsthaus Hamburg. https://kunsthaushamburg.de/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/To-Remember-Differently-1.pdf