EASA NAOHH invites membership and broader public for the next online session of the “In Conversation” series. We will welcome Banu Karaca who will discuss with Sultan Doughan and Athena Athanasiou her current research project Beyond Restitution: Heritage, (Dis)Possession and the Politics of Knowledge.
Tuesday 24 March, 16.00-18.00 GMT/ 17.00-19.00 CET
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Banu Karaca’s research 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, Banu Karaca’s 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. Rather than solely ascertaining current location or ownership, this search for “lost” art presents an avenue to contemplate the workings of epistemic forgetting in the dominant taxonomies of art and heritage and to approach provenance research as a kind of open-ended memory work. It conceptualizes restitution not as an endpoint to mend loss and dispossession but as a starting point for recommitments into knowledge that have the potential to transform the ways in which knowledge on art and heritage is made.
Banu Karaca (Forum Transregionale Studien) will discuss the research for her book-in-progress with Sultan Doughan (Goldsmiths, University of London) and Athena Athanasiou (Panteion University for Social and Political Sciences).
Banu Karaca works at the intersection of political anthropology, critical theory, art, and feminist memory studies. 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). She is currently directing the research group Beyond Restitution: Heritage, (Dis)Possession and the Politics of Knowledge at the Forum Transregionale Studien, Berlin, supported by a Consolidator Grant by the European Research Council.
Dr. Sultan Doughan holds a PhD from Anthropology at UC Berkeley. She is a Lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London in Anthropology, School of Global Change, where she directs the MA Anthropology and Museum Practice. She is also the interim co-director of the Migrant Futures Institute (MFI) at Goldsmiths. Her first book project, Converting Citizens: German Secularism and the Racial Politics of Holocaust Memory, is based on her dissertation research in Berlin, Germany and deals with the minority question in Europe after the Holocaust.
Athena Athanasiou is Professor of Social Anthropology at Panteion University for Social and Political Sciences, Greece. Among her publications are: Agonistic Mourning (2017), Dispossession: The Performative in the Political (with Judith Butler, 2013), Life at the Limit: Essays on Gender, Body, and Biopolitics (2007). Her new book Imaginable Futures? Temporality and Critique Now is forthcoming. Her research interests include: contemporary critical theory, gender and queer theory, biopolitics, anticolonial critique, politics of memory and witnessing.