Pedestals of Absence: The Ephemeral Practice of Public Art in Turkey

Hande Sever
Visual Arts
UC San Diego

My dissertation examines the history of public artworks in Turkey that were demolished by the military government in 1980. By recovering evidence of these lost works, I explore how their destruction constituted a form of place-based violence aimed at annihilating the collective memory of the communities to which this heritage belonged, while analyzing the limits of practices attempting to remedy the lingering effects of said violence. Building on foundational literature on the public sphere (Habermas 1962, Marcuse 1977, Lefebvre 1991) and recent scholarship on censorship in the arts (Lenssen 2016, Karaca 2021, Rogers 2021) and repair (Garneau 2016, Sarr and Savoy 2018, Samudzi 2020), my research investigates how the Turkish military employed the demolition of public artworks as a systematic form of violence, effectively erasing artworks from collective memory, and analyzes how this deliberate destruction created significant challenges for the possibilities of repair in the aftermath.