Project Details
Projekt
Practices of Neo-Ottomanism in Art and Art History: Media of Sacralization between Anachronistic Affirmation and Subversion
Applicant
Professorin Dr. Gabriele Genge
Subject Area
Art History
Term
since 2018
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 322729370
The present research project takes its starting point in the currently much-discussed state appropriations of Ottoman cultural traditions, which must be perceived as the antithesis of those artistic positions investigated in the first part of the project that have, since the 1980s, abandoned the secular dispositif of the Kemalist state. While in the first phase of the project the artistic reclamation of specific local Turkish-Islamic cultural traditions against the universalist-secular discourse of contemporary art intended a critical visualization of plural concepts of history, the focus will now more strongly include those current forms of re-Osmanization that pursue an opposing, affirmative strategy on the part of the state.The conversion of the Hagia Sophia from a Kemalist museum to a mosque ordered by Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in 2020 provides a concrete clue, as does his intensified effort to provide a counterbalance to the international biennials of contemporary art organized by private companies with the Istanbul Yeditepe Biennial for "classical Turkish art" since 2018. With a focus on the material traditions of Islamic arts and crafts as well as a new functionalization of Byzantine and Ottoman monuments, the current cultural policy, according to the thesis, pursues an anachronistic identity campaign, whose actors seek to achieve the annulment of ambiguous perceptions with the proclamation of cultural exclusion and unification. The continuation of the present project into the anachronistic contemporary dis-course of neo-Ottomanism also provides the occasion, on the one hand, to take a closer look at expanded artistic positions, but also, once again, specifically at those sacred media and spaces that are currently gaining political relevance beyond the Kemalist museum discourse. The discussion of "Islamic" art history is now to receive an expanded starting point. Accompanied by recent methodological approaches to a specifically Islamic sacred phenomenology (Shaw 2019), the formative role of Western art historians for the popularized recording of Ottoman Turkish sacred architecture (hamam) as well as other media of the sacred, especially calligraphy, will be examined in depth in order to ask about their precursor role for Erdoğan's affirmative religious policy.
DFG Programme
Research Units
