Book Review
International Journal of Middle East Studies, Volume 54 , Issue 4
November 2022
Book review on Banu Karaca, The National Frame: Art and State Violence in Turkey and Germany. Fordham University Press, 2021.
“The scratch ticket distributed by Kamusal Sanat Laboratuvarı (KSL: Public Art Laboratory) during the opening ceremony of the Eleventh Istanbul Biennial (2011), called the Untitled Letter (Biennial), had been and remained an intervention that, for me as a visual artist working in Istanbul, embodied the tensions inherent in the production, distribution, discussion, institutionalization, and often consequent instrumentalization of contemporary art in Turkey that I have referred to on numerous occasions over the last decade. Only through Banu Karaca's incisive contextualization of this work in Chapter 4 (“The Art of Forgetting”) of The National Frame: Art and State Violence in Turkey and Germany was I able to comprehend the larger scaffolding for this work. The Untitled Letter is addressed by Vehbi Koç, founder of Koç Corporation, the sponsor of not only the Istanbul Biennial but also prominent art institutions including Arter and Mehşer, to the junta leader Kenan Evren in 1980, a few weeks after the violent military coup d’état. Koç's sympathy for Evren's cause seeps into the letter, which ends with the line “I am at your service.” Previously, I had interpreted this artistic gesture as a poignant, critical appropriation of a historical document that has previously not been widely distributed, problematizing how art is funded. Through Karaca's transformative scholarship, I now see it as a symptom of a crisis of culture and cultural policy, often fraught with the entanglements of structures that support, promote, construct, and sustain frameworks of art.”
