Joint Seminar With The Anglo-Turkish Society

Tuesday 10 January 2023,  6.00pm (GMT)

This seminar will be held in-Person at the Royal Anthropological Institute

Booking essential: https://buket-altinoba-lecture.eventbrite.co.uk 

The Istanbul Academy of Fine Arts in the late Ottoman Empire. Between Modernism, Nationbuilding, and Cultural Transfer

Speaker: Dr Buket Altinoba

The Istanbul Academy of Fine Arts in the 1920s, Source: Ataman Demir: Arşivdeki belgeler ışığında Güzel Sanatlar Akademisiʹnde yabancı hocalar: Philipp Gintherʹden Kurt Erdmanʹa kadar (1929-1958), Istanbul 2008.

There was no systematic art education in the Ottoman Empire until it was founded under the auspices of the Ottoman bureaucrat and painter Osman Hamdi Bey in 1882 with the Academy of Fine Arts (Sanâyi-i Nefîse Mektebi) in Istanbul. The former Imperial Academy, based on the Beaux-Art system and renamed several times—first to the Academy of Fine Arts (1928), then to the State Academy of Fine Arts (1964), and later affiliated with the Mimar Sinan University of Fine Arts (1982)—can be classified as a counterpart to the European Academies as it became quickly an important venue for the artistic training and art production in the last decades of the Nineteenth century in the transition from the late Ottoman State to present-day Turkey. Considering the Istanbul Academy as a local institution, the processes of artistic production, distribution, and reception oscillated between the poles of continuity and modernity since these modes were strongly shaped by the reform efforts of the late Ottoman state and later the agenda of the early republican era of Turkey. From an art historical perspective, this paper takes up the founding of this institution, particularly the conditions of its formation located within the specifically imperial institutional field. The process of institutionalization of the Ottoman artistic education is to be negotiated as an evidence of complex cultural, political and social developments within the movements of the long nineteenth century marked by colonialism, imperialism, nation-building, and cultural transfer.

Buket Altinoba (Dr. phil.) is a researcher in the DFG-Project ‘Eigene Stelle’ entitled “Machines for Reproducing Sculpture. Competition and Reproduction Techniques 1770- 1880” at the Institute of Art History of the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. Before holding a visiting professorship at the University of Regensburg, she worked as a research assistant at the Institute for Art and Architectural History at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). She participated as a fellow in the Mathilde Planck Lectureship Program at the State Academy of Fine Arts Stuttgart and was a PhD fellow at the Graduiertenkolleg “Image - Body - Mediu. An Anthropological Perspective” at the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design (HFG). Her PhD on the subject of the Istanbul Academy of Art (2021) was published under the title The Istanbul Academy of Art from its foundation until today. Modern Art, Nation Building and Cultural Transfer in Turkey (Berlin 2016).


You may view the event flyer with full info, including the speaker's biography here:
https://www.angloturkishsociety.org.uk/doc/Buket-Altinoba-lecture.pdf 


Contact: contact@angloturkishsociety.org.uk 

Location : 
Royal Anthropological Institute
50 Fitzroy Street
London
W1T 5BT
United Kingdom
http://www.therai.org.uk