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.
