Practices of Neo-Ottomanism in Art and Art History: Media of Sacralization between Anachronistic Affirmation and Subversion

The starting point of the subproject is the currently much-discussed state appropriation of Ottoman cultural traditions. These are to be understood as the antithesis of artistic positions that since the 1980s have denounced the secular dispositif of the Kemalist state. In the first phase of the project, this artistic reclamation of specific local Turkish-Islamic cultural traditions was investigated, which positioned itself contrary to the universalist-secular discourse of contemporary art and intended a critical visualization of plural concepts of history. In the second phase of the project, the focus will be more on those current forms of re-Ottomanization that pursue an opposing, affirmative strategy on the part of the state.

With a focus on the material traditions of arts and crafts influenced by Islam as well as a new functionalization of Byzantine and Ottoman monuments, the current cultural policy pursues an anachronistic identity campaign whose actors seek to achieve the annulment of ambiguous perceptions through the proclamation of cultural exclusion and unification. The subproject will focus on extended artistic positions on the one hand, but also on those sacred media and spaces that are currently gaining political relevance beyond the Kemalist museum discourse. In addition, accompanied by recent methodological approaches to a specifically Islamic-sacred phenomenology, the discussion of "Islamic" art history will be examined in greater depth, and the formative role of Western art historians for the popularized recording of Ottoman-Turkish sacred architecture as well as other media of the sacred, especially calligraphy, will be investigated in order to ask about their precursor role for the current affirmative religious policy.

The second funding phase's work programme is based on three focal points that can be identified as new preconditions of ambiguous religious politics in Turkish cultural policy and contemporary art. These are: a) The ambiguities of religion and blackness in the device of Black Turks; b) The anachronisms of neo-Ottomanism and constructions of an ambiguous religious-secular present; and c) The queerness and gender politics as ambiguous practices of the religious. In examining the ways in which contemporary fiction engages with the Ottoman past and gender models, queer research methods offer a means of challenging the linearity of historical concepts through the introduction of queerness into temporal and spatial frameworks. Furthermore, they enable the suspension of conventional models of social and sexual ordering.

Collaboration with other sub-projects on specific cross-cutting topics is integrated into this research phase. The lecture series ‘Queerness. Concepts and Debates in the Transcultural Present’, organised in this context and in cooperation with other institutes, highlights various perspectives from different disciplines in which ambiguous gender constellations open up, shift and break down binary distinctions.

The transfer project ‘Ambiguity and Unpredictability: On Forms of Resistance and the Archiving of Queer Narratives’ with the media art fellow Aylime Aslı Demir from Ankara, funded by the Ministry of Culture and Science of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia, complements art historical research with a perspective from curatorial and activist practice.