This year Turkey will unveil its third ‘total’ panorama museum. The first opened in 2009 with much fanfare and commemorated the conquest of Byzantine Constantinople by the Ottoman Empire in 1453. The second, opening next year in Bursa, will depict the 1326 siege of that city by the nascent Ottoman state. The third will portray the Ottoman battle of Gallipoli which deflected predominantly ANZAC troops from the Dardanelles in 1915. By situating the Çanakkale 1915 Panorama Museum within the context of the media it employs, namely museums and panoramas, and by exploring the political economy that has resurrected the medium of the panorama as a didactic form of visual entertainment, I will argue that the museum signifies a concerted effort on the part of an ascendant Islamic bourgeoisie to instruct Turkish citizenry how to interpret their history and how to read this history in the landscape of Turkey. The Çanakkale 1915 museum will emerge in the context of not only a divisive Turkish political climate, evinced by 2013’s Gezi protests, but also in coincidence with another grim anniversary: that of the Armenian Genocide. The extermination of Armenians, and subsequent expelling of other groups, such as the Greek population, drastically altered the demography of Anatolia – the heartland of modern Turkey. Since the foundation of the Turkish Republic in 1923, the country has witnessed a long history of ‘writing Turkishness’ into the landscape. Whether in the form of the Turkish military writing nationalist slogans with large stones on mountainsides or the flourishing of natural sites that are thought to resemble the face of Atatürk, the landscape of Turkey is one of tools through which the Turkish state has legitimated itself. My essay will embed the Çanakkale museum within this tradition of inscribing the nation into Turkish soil and elaborate on the panorama museum’s embodiment of the Turkish-Islamic synthesis. Further, building on existing museum studies scholarship, I will consider the relationship between the format of the museum as a 'panorama' and the narrative it seeks to represent.

The Palestinian Museum: The Dynamics of Institutionalization and Palestinian Emancipatory Politics The Palestinian Museum is currently being built opposite Birzeit University near Ramallah in the West Bank. Its location is significant: the Israel Museum is similarly situated next to the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, the capital city in which the Palestinian Museum officials have stated that they would prefer the nascent museum to be located were it not for the fact that the current political situation makes this impossible. This physical positioning, as well as the museum’s aesthetic as expressed in its textual and visual publications, are designed to set the Palestinian Museum up as a national museum that is simultaneously ‘traditional’,rooted in Palestinian history and landscape, and ‘modern’, capable of operating in the international art world. The Museum’s self-described mission is the preservation of threatened Palestinian heritage, promotion of ‘dialogue’ and the exploration of diverse, alternative (and inherently, counter-) narratives of Palestinian history. In presenting itself simultaneously as a site of resistance and as a conventional public establishment, however, the museum risks accomplishing either. This paper will examine how the Palestinian Museum navigates its intrinsic contradictions as it attempts to establish itself as both a trusted vehicle for the expression of Palestinian ‘narratives and identities’, and as an internationally legible and competitive cultural institution. Specifically, I will analyze the visual and textual material produced by the museum over the past two years in order to address the processes by which it repackages itself, its political message, and the particular Palestinian population it proposes to represent in order to navigate the international museum world. The nascent Palestinian Museum is a locus of conflicting claims, and crystallizes the shifting implications and limitations of the museum form. This in turn offers an opportunity to consider broader questions about how liberation and resistance movements are institutionalized and even monetized, and whether there are contexts in which institutions of any kind can challenge this.

In 2001, the Quincentennial Foundation, previously established to commemorate 500th anniversary of the arrival of the Sephardim to the Ottoman lands, has launched a museum to archive and display the history and culture of the Turkish Jewry. The permanent collection in this museum crystallizes prominent trends in Jewish historiography in Turkey, often criticized as pro-establishment. In this paper, I will explore section “World War II: Émigré scholars, Turkish diplomats, Einstein’s letter" displayed as part of the permanent exhibition. In this section, many visuals, documents, and artifacts are exhibited narrating the so-called "rescue mission" conducted by Turkish Diplomats in Europe during the World War II. Combining interviews/fieldwork on the site with textual analysis of the museum’s website and printed catalogue, I examine how the museum and its curators consolidate their position as the authoritative archive of Turkish-Jewish historiography. This exhibition establishes concrete visual and textual connections with cultural products on the so-called "rescue mission" of Turkish diplomats who allegedly saved thousands of Jews from the Holocaust. It consequently contributes to the proliferation and circulation of a historically challenged narrative, which promotes Turkish government's questionable claims to liberal multiculturalism and humanitarian foreign policy. This “narrative of rescue,” albeit its inconsistencies repeatedly rebutted by scholars, has been instrumental to Turkish diplomatic efforts in warding off the government's responsibilities deriving from the Armenian Genocide. Drawing on this rescue narrative, Turkish diplomats have repeatedly emphasized the so-called "Turkish character," which is, as they put it, "humanitarian and benevolent in nature therefore incapable of committing genocide." In this light, the museum becomes a site where historical documents, visuals, and artifacts are mobilized to promote a questionable historiography of the Second World War with regards to Turkey and Turkish Jewry, and lend themselves to make problematic diplomatic claims. In that light, this paper will address broader implications of the “narrative of rescue” and contribute to the scholarship on historiography and museum studies in general, with Turkey as a particular instance.

Museums are set up as “contact zones” that privilege and convey specific knowledge and experiences to visitors. As the scope of museums evolve, however, websites have come to serve as an extension of the museum experience for international audiences. This is especially true when the website in question is built by a museum itself. This paper explores the official Israeli museum of the Holocaust, Yad Vashem, and its English website, to raise questions about the materialization of pain to convey political messages beyond honoring the memory of those who suffered or lost their lives in the Holocaust. Combining textual and visual culture analysis on the site, I show how such materialization implicates the “museumization” of photographs and the homogenization of Jewish life and testimony. I further argue that the visitor to the website as well as the museum is invited to be mobilized and attuned to the Zionist discourse that Yad Vashem seeks to promote, which I posit, is especially patent in the museum texts concerning the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, especially concerning pre-Mandate history, terminology and current political concerns, such as Islamism. The empathy created by pain narratives duly generates a space through which political links can be forged regarding Israeli state practices apropos Palestinians. Yad Vashem website’s emphasis on suffering normalizes and commodifies the experiences of survivors into a permanent collection of pain, and elides different contexts and subjectivities into a “Holocaust Experience” for the visitor. I will therefore juxtapose the museum site with the English website to consider both the forms of extending the sphere of influence of the museum, and their content. In that context, the international reach of the website in English has broader implications than commemoration, and this paper will address these implications together with the museum site itself.