Banu Karaca

Banu Karaca is an anthropologist working at the intersection of political anthropology, art and aesthetics, nationalism and cultural policy, museums and commemorative practices. She holds a PhD from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Her first book, The National Frame: Art and State Violence in Turkey and Germany was published by Fordham University Press in 2021 and examines the entrenchment of art in state violence. Some of her recent publications interrogate the politics of intercultural exchange programs in Europe, freedom of expression in the arts, the visualization of gendered memories of war and political violence, and visual literacy.

Her ongoing research examines how dispossessed, looted and missing artworks have shaped the writing of art history in Turkey. She is the co-founder of Siyah Bant, a research platform that documents censorship in the arts in Turkey. She was Visiting Assistant Professor of Cultural Studies at Sabanci University and a Faculty Fellow at Columbia University’s Center for the Study of Social Difference. She has held fellowships in, among others, the Art Histories and Aesthetics and Europe in the Middle East – The Middle East in Europe Research Programmes at the Forum Transregionale Studien, Berlin, by the IPC-Mercator Foundation, and the Foundation for Arts Initiatives.

This research project reflects on the absence provenance research in Turkey. Although this absence is often attributed to ‘belated modernization,’ missing provenance has to be understood within the context of different kinds of symbolic, material, and economic dispossession deeply intertwined with the history of art and its institutions in the late Ottoman Empire and the early Turkish Republic. Rather than solely tracing current location or ownership, this project approaches artworks as cultural memory and historical witnesses. Marked by impasses and errantry in its ethnographic and archival search for ‘lost’ art, it seeks to counteract the impulse of recovery and recuperation.

Instead, it suggests contemplating different economies of remembering and forgetting by asking what kinds of loss missing artworks engender. Conceptualized as an anthropological inquiry into the writing of art history, the project tries to account for both the material and temporal challenges that art presents, as artworks tend to evade the certainties of ‘origin’ and ‘original meaning’ that the melancholic project of art history wants to evoke.