Art Histories
2015/ 2016

Banu Karaca

Missing Provenance, ‘Lost’ Works: The Blind-Spots of Art History in Turkey

“Wealth Tax”. Picture taken during an auction of household items held under duress to cover the wealth tax imposed on non-Muslims (1942-43). Source: http://yenisafak.com.tr/. Licensed under Fair use of copyrighted material in the context of Varlik Vergisi via Wikipedia.

Banu Karaca (PhD, The Graduate Center, The City University of New York) is a sociocultural anthropologist working at the intersection of political anthropology, art and aesthetics, nationalism and cultural policy, museums and commemorative practices. She is currently completing a manuscript entitled Decivilizing Art: Cultural Policy and Nationalism in Turkey and Germany, which examines the entrenchment of art in state violence. Karaca’s ongoing research centers on the question of missing provenance of artworks in Turkey against the background of the politics of dispossession in the late Ottoman Empire and throughout the republic. Some of her recent and forthcoming publications interrogate the politics of intercultural exchange programs in the EU, freedom of expression in the arts, and the visualization of gendered memories of war and political violence. Karaca is the co-founder of Siyah Bant, a research platform that documents censorship in the arts in Turkey, and continues her research on the possibilities and limitations of art as cultural memory in reconciliation processes.

Missing Provenance, ‘Lost’ Works: The Blind-Spots of Art History in Turkey

Karaca will produce two articles based on her current research. Tentatively entitled Missing Provenance, ‘Lost’ Works – The Blind-Spots of Art History in Turkey, this project aims to account for the phenomenon of missing provenance in Turkey. Although this lack is often attributed to “belated modernization”, she proposes that missing provenance has to be understood within the context of different kinds of symbolic, material and economic dispossession that are deeply intertwined with the history of art and its institutions. Tracing the circulation of late Ottoman and early republican painting through ethnographic interviews and archival work, it focuses on the conceptual and practical obstacles that provenance research faces in Turkey today. Central to this research is the assumption that with missing provenance we also lose the stories of artists, collectors and audiences—all of which are vital in our understanding of art historical trajectories and taxonomies. Rather than solely tracing current location or ownership, this research project proposes to see works of art as both cultural memory and historical witnesses.