Project description
How art dispossession and violence shape the knowledge production on heritage
On the backdrop of ongoing debates to decolonialise museums, the EU-funded BEYONDREST project will study whether the restitution of cultural property can be regarded as a closure of historical wounds. Its working hypothesis is that the dispossession of art and cultural heritage is a precondition for how art and cultural assets circulate. The project will explore the kind of loss dispossessed art engenders, and how this loss has shaped knowledge production on heritage. The focus will be on the interconnections between Western Europe, the Near and Middle East, and North Africa, starting in the mid-19th century when innumerable objects made their way into international collections by way of looting, theft, and sales under duress.
Objective
On the backdrop of ongoing debates to decolonialize museums, BEYONDREST asks if the return of looted art can be regarded as a closure of historical wounds. The project probes the focus on restitution that inadvertently casts dispossessed art in terms of contested property. Instead, BEYONDREST explores what kind of loss dispossessed art engenders, and how this loss has shaped the knowledge production on heritage. It focuses on the interlocution between Western Europe, the Near and Middle East, and North Africa, mapping relationships between people and “things” that have largely been left out of current debates. The project starts in the mid-19th century, which witnessed the rise of the museum in its modern form as well as violence unleashed by imperial and colonial projects and dispossession. Innumerable objects made their way into international collections, categorized mostly as “Islamic art,” or as the “universal heritage of humankind” that nonetheless symbolically and proprietarily belongs to the “West.” BEYONDREST tackles dispossession not as a loss to be mended but a means to transform knowledge through inquiries into absence. The interdisciplinary research group will employ a wide methodologically matrix, including ethnographic interviews, visual analysis of exhibitions, archival research, and textual analysis of the laws governing cultural assets to capture the proprietary stakes in the interplay of epistemic remembering and forgetting. BEYONDREST takes risks by centering on what is absent, rather than present, on what is lost, rather than found. It argues that the dispossession of art is not merely a problematic of colonialism or empire, that is of the past, but an ongoing process that is constitutive for the governance of heritage in its national and transnational formations. BEYONDREST’s working hypothesis is that the dispossession of art and cultural heritage is not an aberration, but a precondition for the ways in which art and cultural assets circulate.
Fields of science
Programme(s)
- HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC) Main Programme
Funding Scheme
HORIZON-AG - HORIZON Action Grant Budget-BasedHost institution
14193 BERLIN
Germany