Tuesday 29 May 2018

This panel engages in a conversation on art that embodies crisis and loss by moving beyond the hegemonic taxonomies of space, place and belonging. The first paper focuses on missing and dispossessed artworks from the late Ottoman Empire and the early Turkish Republic. Asking what kind of loss missing artworks engender, it works against the impulse of recovery aiming instead to contemplate divergent economies of remembering and forgetting. The second paper focuses on instantiations of contemporary art which address (un)belonging and displacement. It seeks to think the resistant potential of artistic performances embodying tropes of gendered, sexualized, ethnicized and racialized vulnerability.

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 Ph.D. from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Her manuscript The Art of Forgetting – Intimacy and Erasure in German and Turkish Histories of Art 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, and a Faculty Fellow at Columbia University’s Center for the Study of Social Difference. After holding fellowships in the Art Histories and Aesthetics and Europe in the Middle East – The Middle East in Europe Research Programs at the Forum Transregionale Studien, Berlin, she is currently a Mercator-IPC Fellow in Istanbul.

Elena Tzelepis completed her doctoral studies in philosophy at the New School for Social Research, New York.  She has taught at Columbia University, New York, and has been a fellow at the Center for the Study of Social Difference, Columbia University, and at the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, University of London. She is an assistant professor at the University of Thessaly, Greece. She writes on the intersections of politics and art, on critique and social change, and on the politics of difference.