Periodic Reporting for period 1 - BEYONDREST (Beyond Restitution: Heritage, (Dis)Possession and the Politics of Knowledge)
Reporting period: 2022-07-01 to 2024-12-31
Against the backdrop of ongoing debates on decolonizing museums, “Beyond Restitution: Heritage, (Dis)Possession and the Politics of Knowledge” (BEYONDREST) asks if the return of looted art can indeed be regarded as a closure of historical wounds. The project probes the focus on restitution that casts dispossessed art in terms of contested property. Instead, it 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 restitution debates. The project starts in the mid-19th century, which witnessed the rise of the museum in its modern form as well as the 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 conceptualizes restitution not as an endpoint to mend loss and dispossession but as a starting point to transform the ways in which we make knowledge on art and heritage. The interdisciplinary research group employs a wide methodological matrix, including ethnographic interviews, visual analysis of exhibitions, archival research, and examinations of the laws governing cultural assets to capture the proprietary stakes in the interplay of epistemic remembering and forgetting. The research extends to contemporary artistic approaches to dispossessed heritage as alternate paths of knowledge making in a field that has to contend with the impasses that arise when centering on what is absent rather than what is present. BEYONDREST 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 of the governance of heritage in its national and transnational formations.
BEYONDREST has established ethics procedures and practices, and a data management plan that have solidly guided the first fieldwork phases of the team. The research group members have made significant progress with their individual and collective research and publications and presented their first results at various occasions.
The PI, Banu Karaca, submitted her article “Die Eigentümlichkeit der Kunst” for the forthcoming conference proceedings “Paradoxes of Protection” of the 18th Conference of the Isa Lohmann-Siems Foundation. Her article “Ulusal Çerçeve ve Kültür Politikaların Huzursuzluğu” appeared in the peer-reviewed journal “Mülkiye.” She was invited to talk about art dispossessed during the 1964 exiling of Istanbul’s Greek Orthodox population for the podcast-series “Apelasis.” She has been invited for talks and panel discussions at Goldsmiths - University of London, the Stanford Humanities Center, the Berlin Funding Program for Artistic Research, and the Department of Modern Art History at Technical University Berlin, amongst others. In the fall of 2024, she was appointed to the Research Advisory Board of ifa (Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen).
Postdoctoral researcher Çiçek İlengiz is conducting research on her sub-project “Inheriting Anatolia: Representation, Knowledge Production and Imagination.” Completing two research phases in Turkey, she presented her findings at (inter)national conferences and workshops, including the 2024 EASA conference, the 2023 MESA Annual Meeting, and the 2023 Turkologentag. In cooperation with the online magazine AllegraLab, she organized three film screenings as part of the BEYONDREST Conversation Series.
In September 2024, Zoya Masoud joined the project as a second postdoctoral researcher. Her sub-project entitled “Irrestitutable: Inquiries into Hauntings of Absent Cultural Heritage” explores how the layers of absence caused by the dislocation, looting, and destruction of objects manifest themselves in urban environments, archival documents, and cultural institutions, as well as in the experiences of locals, emigrants and scholars in Europe and the Middle East.
The BEYONDREST research group has successfully launched the conversation series “Restitution and its Vantage Points: Beyond the Preservation Paradigm” to examine the shift from the paradigm of “preserving the past” to one of “preserving the museum” and to explore how restitution holds the potential to transform the ways of producing knowledge on cultural heritage. They also organized a well-received panel with the same thematic focus at the 2023 Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association. In addition, BEYONDREST organized the workshop “Beyond Property: Cultural Heritage, Ownership and the Making of Knowledge” (October 2024, Istanbul), which explored how the knowledge production on heritage has come to be predicated on property relations and ownership, in cooperation with the Institut Français d'Études Anatoliennes (IFEA) and the Swedish Research Institute in Istanbul (SRII). The workshop and the conversation series will culminate in two separate publications.
The PI, Banu Karaca, submitted her article “Die Eigentümlichkeit der Kunst” for the forthcoming conference proceedings “Paradoxes of Protection” of the 18th Conference of the Isa Lohmann-Siems Foundation. Her article “Ulusal Çerçeve ve Kültür Politikaların Huzursuzluğu” appeared in the peer-reviewed journal “Mülkiye.” She was invited to talk about art dispossessed during the 1964 exiling of Istanbul’s Greek Orthodox population for the podcast-series “Apelasis.” She has been invited for talks and panel discussions at Goldsmiths - University of London, the Stanford Humanities Center, the Berlin Funding Program for Artistic Research, and the Department of Modern Art History at Technical University Berlin, amongst others. In the fall of 2024, she was appointed to the Research Advisory Board of ifa (Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen).
Postdoctoral researcher Çiçek İlengiz is conducting research on her sub-project “Inheriting Anatolia: Representation, Knowledge Production and Imagination.” Completing two research phases in Turkey, she presented her findings at (inter)national conferences and workshops, including the 2024 EASA conference, the 2023 MESA Annual Meeting, and the 2023 Turkologentag. In cooperation with the online magazine AllegraLab, she organized three film screenings as part of the BEYONDREST Conversation Series.
In September 2024, Zoya Masoud joined the project as a second postdoctoral researcher. Her sub-project entitled “Irrestitutable: Inquiries into Hauntings of Absent Cultural Heritage” explores how the layers of absence caused by the dislocation, looting, and destruction of objects manifest themselves in urban environments, archival documents, and cultural institutions, as well as in the experiences of locals, emigrants and scholars in Europe and the Middle East.
The BEYONDREST research group has successfully launched the conversation series “Restitution and its Vantage Points: Beyond the Preservation Paradigm” to examine the shift from the paradigm of “preserving the past” to one of “preserving the museum” and to explore how restitution holds the potential to transform the ways of producing knowledge on cultural heritage. They also organized a well-received panel with the same thematic focus at the 2023 Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association. In addition, BEYONDREST organized the workshop “Beyond Property: Cultural Heritage, Ownership and the Making of Knowledge” (October 2024, Istanbul), which explored how the knowledge production on heritage has come to be predicated on property relations and ownership, in cooperation with the Institut Français d'Études Anatoliennes (IFEA) and the Swedish Research Institute in Istanbul (SRII). The workshop and the conversation series will culminate in two separate publications.
BEYONDREST has established itself as an innovative space to explore the conceptual groundwork that needs to accompany acts of restitution. It goes beyond the state of the art by conceptualizing restitution not as an endpoint but a first step towards historical justice and generating modes of knowledge production on art and heritage that are not predicated on possession. BEYONDREST takes the question of restitution as an anchor to examine how possession and dispossession, remembering and forgetting have been central to the production of knowledge on art and heritage. Aiming to go beyond current debates of restitution as ultimate repair, BEYONDREST tackles the modalities of knowledge production at the intersection of the social sciences, anthropology, heritage studies, art history, archaeology, and the legal frameworks that govern cultural assets and cultural rights. Finally, BEYONDREST looks at the under-studied continuities between art and heritage when it comes to making knowledge on the past instead.
BEYONDREST has expanded its initial research agenda to focus on property and its role in the knowledge production on heritage and in restitution debates (see “Beyond Property” Workshop above). Following the productive discussions around establishing BEYONDREST’s ethics procedures, the research group organized the workshop “Beyond Guidelines,” which has culminated in the ongoing blog series “Beyond Guidelines: The Question of Ethics in Transregional Research and Knowledge Production,” a critical discussion of research ethics in methodological and conceptual terms. Five contributions have already been published in the series, including the introduction by the PI and an article by Çiçek İlengiz (for details see publications). In addition, BEYONDREST’s international networking and dissemination activities have paved the way for future collaborations. Its goal of addressing different stakeholders has materialized earlier than expected through its public-facing activities (e.g. the conversation series) which were well attended and received by stakeholders in Berlin, in and from the region under study, as well as by community members.
BEYONDREST has expanded its initial research agenda to focus on property and its role in the knowledge production on heritage and in restitution debates (see “Beyond Property” Workshop above). Following the productive discussions around establishing BEYONDREST’s ethics procedures, the research group organized the workshop “Beyond Guidelines,” which has culminated in the ongoing blog series “Beyond Guidelines: The Question of Ethics in Transregional Research and Knowledge Production,” a critical discussion of research ethics in methodological and conceptual terms. Five contributions have already been published in the series, including the introduction by the PI and an article by Çiçek İlengiz (for details see publications). In addition, BEYONDREST’s international networking and dissemination activities have paved the way for future collaborations. Its goal of addressing different stakeholders has materialized earlier than expected through its public-facing activities (e.g. the conversation series) which were well attended and received by stakeholders in Berlin, in and from the region under study, as well as by community members.