Event overview
Author Banu Karaca in conversation with Astrid Schmetterling and Sultan Doughan.
Based on long-term ethnographic research in the art worlds of Istanbul and Berlin, The National Frame: Art and State Violence in Turkey and Germany rethinks the politics of art by focusing on the role of art in state governance. It argues that artistic practices, arts patronage and sponsorship, collecting and curating art, and the modalities of censorship continue to be refracted through the conceptual lens of the nation-state, despite the globalization of the arts. By examining discussions of the civilizing function of art in Turkey and Germany and particularly moments in which art is seen to cede this function, The National Frame reveals the histories of violence on which the production, circulation, and very understanding of art are predicated.
Banu Karaca works at the intersection of political anthropology and critical theory, art, aesthetics, 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). She is the Director of the ERC-funded Research Group Beyond Restitution: Heritage, (Dis)Possession and the Politics of Knowledge at the Forum.
Sultan Doughan is a political anthropologist working on issues of citizenship, civic education, religious difference as race, memory, and genocide through the lens of secularism. She has published on the question of hidden histories and archives in nationalized collective memory specifically of Palestinians and other Middle Eastern diasporic groups in Germany. She is currently preparing her first book Converting Citizens? German Secularism and the Politics of Holocaust Memory after Gaza. She is the Convenor of the MA programme Anthropology and Museum Practice.
Astrid Schmetterling is Co-Head of the Department of Visual Cultures, together with Lynn Turner. She is an art historian with a focus on transcultural memory studies. She has written about the early 20th century German-Jewish artists Charlotte Salomon, Else Lasker-Schüler and Erna Pinner, as well as about contemporary practitioners Arnold Dreyblatt, Uriel Orlow and others. She has also co-authored a publication with Lynn Turner, Visual Cultures As Recollection (Sternberg, 2013).
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 19 Mar 2024 | 5:00pm - 7:00pm |
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