Projekt

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This project centers on episodes of state violence against non-Muslims in the late Ottoman Empire and 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 current location or ownership, this search 'lost' art presents an avenue to contemplate the dynamics of remembering and forgetting in the knowledge production on 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 for the art world and its institutions.

• Dr. Banu Karaca

  Forum Transregionale Studien
  Berlin
  

• Art, Dispossession, and Imaginations of Justice: Thinking with the Works of Maria Eichhorn and Dilek Winchester

• A Strange Kind of Property: Art, Dispossession, and the Politics of Knowledge

• The Materialities and Legalities of Forgetting: Dispossession and the Making of Turkey s (Post-)Ottoman and Heritage

• Süregiden iddet Tarihinde Suc Ortakl ile Müdahillik ve Payda l k (Histories of Ongoing Violence: Complicity and Implication)