This paper examines four archaeological and ethnographic museums in the provinces of Turkey that were designed by Erten Altaban, a female architect. While these museums have long been neglected and even viewed as a sign of Turkey's failure to preserve its cultural heritage, it is possible to view the erratic structure of these museums as the metaphoric reflection of a fragmented memory project, rather than a clear and unambiguous one. According to Foucault, ‘What is found at the historical beginning of things is not the inviolable identity of their origin; it is the dissention of other things. It is disparity.’ Refusing to face the disparity, the Turkish modernizers created a historical discourse based on a search for a pure origin. The conflict between the imagined and the existing memories led to a troublesome historiography in which what to remember and what to forget was contested. Because of the controversy about what would represent the national identity, the official discourse has never been certain, although it maintained a hegemonic attitude that excluded the non-Turkish and non-Islamic components. Based on the theories of cosmopolitanism and feminism, this paper points out that the abandoned spaces of these archaeological and ethnographic museums contain the potential to draw attention to what has been forgotten within the official historiographies. Differing from the existing scholarship that primarily focuses on the central museums and views them as direct representations of dominant historical narratives, this study points at the peripheral structures as conveyers of the memories that were left out of the prevailing accounts.

In an era when international art biennials have become the dominant format for promoting contemporary art on a global scale, it is important to ask what it means to hold an art biennial under the conditions of an ongoing military occupation. My proposed paper explores the unique possibilities, contradictions and dilemmas arising from Palestine’s Qalandiya International Art Biennial. I focus in particular on the changing approaches to space, place and embodiment in the work of contemporary Palestinian artists, curators and cultural institutions. Qalandiya International, which was first inaugurated in 2012 as a protest against the increasing fragmentation and isolation of Palestinian society, provides a multidimensional framework for investigation. Depictions of place and space have been prominent in Palestinian art since the early 20th century, and this concern has dominated Palestinian art since the Nakba. But Palestinian artists are increasingly shifting away from static depictions of place and focusing on performative and participatory practices as a means of generating new kinds of spaces, and embodying them. While these practices are widespread in contemporary art, their meaning both derives from and extends beyond their local context. Likewise, the significance of Qalandiya International extends beyond Palestine. The rise of “biennial culture” has not been without controversy, and critics contend that international art biennials stage the deterritorialized global marketplace as spectacle. In the terms of this critique, biennials are seen as representing one of the last sites of colonial encounter. Yet Qalandiya International lacks the presence of significant global capital and its distorting influence. What possibilities might emerge in its absence? What are some of the lessons to be learned from a biennial that functions as an act of resistance to a colonial situation? What insights from Palestine can be productively brought to bear on the larger debates about biennial culture? The third Biennial will take place in October 2016, and while my paper will focus on the first two editions, I will conclude with reflections from Qalandiya International 2016

This paper explores the design, production, and political significance of Mahdist jibba during the late nineteenth century and its collection, display, and re-fashioning during the twentieth. The jibba is a garment popularized by Muhammad Ahmed al-Mahdi. This garment marked embodied belief in the Nile valley, served as an artifact of diplomatic exchange across the Sahel and the Red Sea, featured in British propaganda portraiture meant to popularize military intervention in Sudan (1896-1898), and became a prized artifact in museum collections, ranging from small regimental museums in rural Britain to the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. My paper demonstrates how the Mahdist jibba has been a contested political symbol in every incarnation, from its origin to the present. The Mahdist jibba began as purposely-ragged cotton garment worn in early 1880s and was later fashioned into highly stylized incarnations as a demarcation of rank and status within the Mahdist state. It used color, fabric, and style as a visual and material marker of piety, regional affiliation, and economic isolationism. Yet woven into the very fabric of the garment were the inherent contradictions of this state: the pretense of piety transformed into the grandeur of the jibba, the state’s claim to level regional difference stood in marked contrast to the distinctly regional variations of the garment, and the presence of fabrics produced from outside Sudan contradicted claims of commercial sequestration. Arabic sources on cotton production and dress, military photography of prisoners (1886-1898), and acquisition reports from museums (1886-1915), show the transformation of the jibba into a trophy, tourist souvenir, period costume, and highly sought piece of Islamic art. In the years leading up to the British conquest of Sudan in 1898, European prisoners who escaped the Mahdist state dressed in the jibba and posed for portrait photographs and paintings to ceremony appropriate the power of the Mahdist state while at the same time discrediting its sovereignty. This unusual source is a three-dimensional text that can be read to understand politics within the Mahdist state, visual propaganda used to justify imperial interventions, and the legacies of the Mahdiyya in Sudan, Britain, and the wider world.

The history of the moriscos has remained a contested part of Spain’s self-understanding. This paper examines how nineteenth-century intellectuals, artists, and politicians reframed the catastrophe in response to pervasive anxieties of their own era. As Spain struggled to define its national identity two hundred years after the expulsion of the moriscos, internal conflict, political instability, the loss of the American colonies, economic crisis, and war with the Moroccan protectorate transformed the “morisco problem” into an ideological point of reference. Accounts of the expulsion became a national exercise in historical revisionism, stimulated by Isabel II and subsequently Alfonso XII. This paper analyzes the nationalistic thrust apparent in nineteenth-century historiographies of the morisco expulsion. It takes into account both written accounts by Pascual Boronat y Barrachina, María Sangrador y Vitores, Manuel Danvila y Collado, and Florencio Janer y Graells and visual depictions of the expulsion by painters Edwin Long, Francisco Domingo Marqués, and Gabriel Puig Roda. These tendentious historiographies, in both written and visual forms, invite reflection on Spain’s longstanding struggle to come to terms with the violence and intolerance of this chapter in its history.