The National Frame

The book reveals how art worlds are crucial sites for unmasking state violence and dispossession.

Karaca Banu :

Banu Karaca is a fellow at the Foundation for Arts Initiatives in New York and an Assistant Professor and EUME Fellow of the Volkswagen Foundation at the Forum Transregionale Studien in Berlin.Banu Karaca is a fellow at the Foundation for Arts Initiatives in New York and an Assistant Professor and EUME Fellow of the Volkswagen Foundation at the Forum Transregionale Studien in Berlin.

Kabir Tambar, Stanford University:
In The National Frame, Banu Karaca demonstrates how histories of violence that are often conventionally understood to have been overcome (the Holocaust and the Armenian Genocide) remain deeply formative of the political present, shaping the economic and cultural policies of the German and Turkish states. With impeccable and eye-opening scholarship, Karaca forces the history of art to confront the history of genocide. The National Frame presents a masterful interrogation of the geopolitics of modernity.

Marianne Hirsch, co-author of School Photos in Liquid Time: Reframing Difference:
If you believe that art is inherently progressive, emancipatory, and universal, you must read this important case study of the nationalist and de-civilizing capacities of art, and its official uses and misuses, in Germany and Turkey. Exploring how national frames delimit the production, circulation, collection, and display of visual art works, Banu Karaca unsettles pervasive assumptions through immanent critique, while also offering a new understanding of the political role of art in our contemporary world.