Banu Karaca

Aron Rodrigue International Visitor
Director of the Research Group Beyond Restitution: Heritage, (Dis)Possession and the Politics of Knowledge; EUME, Forum Transregionale Studien, Berlin

Banu Karaca works at the intersection of political anthropology and critical theory, art, aesthetics, and cultural policy, museum and feminist memory studies. She holds a PhD from the Graduate Center, The City University of New York. She has been Visiting Assistant Professor of Cultural Studies at Sabanci University and Faculty Fellow at Columbia University’s Center for the Study of Social Difference. 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). Currently, she is completing an essay with the working title Art in War: Cultural Heritage and the (Legal) Codification of Forgetting. As the co-founder of Siyah Bant, a research platform that documents and analyzes censorship in the arts in Turkey, she has also contributed to the Universal Periodic Review of Turkey before the UN Human Rights Council.


Banu Karaca’s work has been supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Foundation for Arts Initiatives (FfAI), Mercator, the Art Histories and Aesthetic Practices and Europe in the Middle East – The Middle East in Europe (EUME) research programs at the Forum Transregionale Studien, the ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry, and the Volkswagen Foundation, among others. In 2022, she was awarded a Consolidator Grant by the European Research Council for her project “Beyond Restitution: Heritage, (Dis)Possession and the Politics of Knowledge (BEYONDREST).” As part of BEYONDREST, she continues her research on how dispossession and loss have shaped the scholarly and legal knowledge production on art in Turkey and beyond.


Karaca was nominated by the Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies.


 

Projects and Publications

Interview - The National Frame: Art and the State Violence in Turkey and Germany

Essay - Art, Dispossession, and Imaginations of Historical Justice

Banu Karaca