Review: Osman Hamdi Bey and the Americans: Archaeology, Diplomacy, Art; Scramble for the Past: A Story of Archaeology in the Ottoman Empire, 1753–1914; and Artamonoff: Picturing Byzantine Istanbul, 1930–1947

Abstract

Osman Hamdi Bey and the Americans: Archaeology, Diplomacy, Art Pera Museum, Istanbul 15 October 2011–8 January 2012 Scramble for the Past: A Story of Archaeology in the Ottoman Empire, 1753–1914 SALT Galata, Istanbul 22 November 2011–11 March 2012 Artamonoff: Picturing Byzantine Istanbul, 1930–1947 Koc University Research Center for Anatolian Civilizations, Istanbul 25 June–10 November 2013 Three exhibitions that examine ways of looking at the ancient and Byzantine past from the eighteenth to the early twentieth century were recently on display in Istanbul. These exhibitions reevaluated the changing discourses and practices of archaeology as both a scholarly enterprise and a popular endeavor, particularly in relation to the late Ottoman and early Turkish contexts. They explored how contemporaries looked at, understood, and wrote about the culture, art, and architecture of the past from their various and varying perspectives. The exhibition Scramble for the Past: A Story of Archaeology in the Ottoman Empire, 1753–1914 at SALT Galata was curated by Zainab Bahrani, Zeynep Celik, and Edhem Eldem (Figure 1). It revolved around a double narrative of an apparently conventional historical account of the birth and development of “modern archaeology” from the founding of the British Museum in 1753 to the establishment of the Ottoman Pious Foundations Museum in 1914 alongside a contested story about some historically renowned archaeological sites that once dotted the former Ottoman lands. As its provocative title Scramble for the Past suggests, rather than presenting a celebratory narrative of archaeological practice, the exhibition put forward a critical interpretation of the history of archaeology. The seemingly neutral time line, highlighting the major dates in the long march of archaeology alongside significant historical political events, constituted a backdrop on the walls and literally encircled the main body of display, which focused on certain archaeological sites within the framework of eight different themes. True to the exploratory and interdisciplinary cultural mission of SALT, the sites were presented through their various historical representations in different media from written texts to oil paintings, from drawings to photographs and films, together with some original artifacts, among which were also dispersed commissioned installations on the nature of archaeology by artists Mark Dion …