Banu Karaca

Banu Karaca (Ph.D. 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 a Faculty Fellow at Columbia University’s Center for the Study of Social Difference, and at the Art Histories and Aesthetic Practices Research Program, Forum Transregionale Studien, Berlin. Her manuscript “Decivilizing Art: Cultural Policy and Nationalism in Turkey and Germany” examines the entrenchment of art in state violence based on extensive research in the art worlds of Istanbul and Berlin.
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 publications interrogate freedom of expression in the arts, the visualization of gendered memories of war and political violence, and visual literacy. She is the co-founder of Siyah Bant, a research platform that documents censorship in the arts in Turkey.