Description:

Violent Possessions: Cultural Heritage and the Politics of Knowledge

A lecture by Banu Karaca, Forum Transregionale Studien, Berlin

With responses by 
College Fellow Antowan Byrd Art History
Kade Visiting Professor Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky German
Visiting Research Fellow Philipp Hohmann Critical Theory Program
and Ruslana Lichtzier Art History

Banu Karaca works at the intersection of political anthropology and critical theory, art and cultural policy, museum and feminist memory studies. She has published on freedom of expression in the arts, the visualization of gendered memories of war and political violence, visual literacy, and restitution. She is the author of The National Frame: Art and State Violence in Turkey and Germany (Fordham University Press, 2021) and co-editor of Women Mobilizing Memory (Columbia University Press, 2019). As the co-founder of Siyah Bant (Black Ribbon), a research platform documenting censorship in the arts in Turkey (2011-2019), Banu has contributed to the Universal Periodic Reviews of Turkey before the UN Human Rights Council. Her essay “Violent Possessions,” which will be published later this year, is based on Banu’s ongoing research on how dispossessed art has shaped the legal and scholarly knowledge production on art in Turkey and the wider European context. Since July 2022, Banu has been directing the research group “Beyond Restitution: Heritage, (Dis)Possession and the Politics of Knowledge” at the Forum Transregionale Studien, Berlin, funded by the European Research Council.  Currently, Banu is a Aron Rodrigue Visiting Scholar at the Stanford Humanities Center (April 2023).