Arts & Humanities Research (MPhil) (PhD)
Emin Artun Ozguner
INHERITANCE / DISAVOWAL: Commemorating and Representing the Nation-State in Turkey from Empire to Republic, 1908-1940s
This study aims to understand the role of urban spatial commemorative culture and their diffusion via print practices for the representation of the nation-state in Turkey, between 1908 and the 1940s. Encompassing three major phases in Turkish history (the proto-nationalist revolution of 1908, the republican nation-building after WWI and the more liberal tendencies in the post-WWII era) the period studied is testimony to a major shift from an empire to a modern nation-state.
Accounts of political history on the state culture of the period often emphasize the role of a top-down transformation in politics in explaining the arrival of secular republican culture. This thesis indicates, however, to the agency of a cultural revolution in changing the values of the society, through a plethora of modern material devices such as print media, monuments, electric illumination, illustrated journals, and photography. When these are observed through the gradual nationalisation of the cosmopolitan network of designers, artists, and publishers, the period seems to have accommodated a more disparate use of modernism than the monolithic tone, political history often suggests.
This study focuses specifically on the redefinition of the spatial memory landscape through the construction of monuments and the orchestration of commemorative events, along with attempts to diffuse these as a cohesive narrative through print media, first in the efforts of the Ottoman modernizers, the Young Turk elite and later by its republican successor under the aegis of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. While print culture affords the permeation of these new memory landscapes through postcards, stamps, illustrated journals, newspapers, and banknotes, the very materiality of these artefacts reveals the tensions between politics, design resources, and technologies at hand. Hence, a close attention to the agency of monuments in commemorative events and their representation in print demonstrates how the transition to a nation-state was made to operate by the ruling political elite through the endorsement of some inherited legacies and the disavowal of others. Thus, a corollary amnesia was evident both in the practices of the Young Turk modernizers between 1908 and 1923 and their republican successors from the early 1920s on, as they approached design as a material tool for the self-assertion of national modernity.
The research aims to provide new knowledge on the history of Turkish modernity by arguing how both regimes projected similar commemorative practices on a prevailing memory landscape for the claim of different legitimacies through an artefact-led design history methodology. By doing so it also highlights the role of design materialities in the non-Western paradigm as simultaneous agents of social cohesion and emancipation rather than its outright denunciation as emulation.
Featured image: Anonymous (c.1927). ©SALT Research, Istanbul — Contemporary photocard, depicting the Zafer (Victory) monument complex, designed by the Austrian sculptor, Heinrich Krippel in 1927.
I started the V&A/RCA's History of Design programme in 2016 with a specialisation in the political visual and print cultures of the late Ottoman Empire and early Turkish modernity. I had previously earned a master in Design Studies (2013, Izmir University of Economics, Turkey) and in Graphic Design (2015, Istituto Europeo di Design, Milano). Currently, I work as an associate lecturer at the University for the Creative Arts, teaching Contextual and Theoretical Studies for graphic design students.
My previous engagement with graphic design practice has inclined me to seek for a more object-based approach to history in my research, placing reproduction techniques at the centre of the study of visual culture. The research culture at the RCA has enabled me to pursue this direction with a much more interdisciplinary conscious approach to history. Often nation-states are encapsulated in a graphic image that is widely circulated and recognisable. Today these are so powerful that they silently remind us of boundaries, cultures, politics, and a lot more on anything they are printed on. Yet often, in our habit of taking them as indisputable tokens for nations, we tend to disregard the historical, political, cultural and social discourses through which the design of these icons has been negotiated. What do officially sanctioned representations exclude more than what they include? Most importantly, who made them and what people thought of them before they found the level of widespread circulation they do today? And what if graphics is not the only designerly trajectory to represent an idea of a nation-state? Can technology be assigned an equally representative role for a nation-state beyond graphics?
The onset of the twentieth century has witnessed the rise of nationalism(s), of which the material world we live in is still a byproduct. Designers have since entangled with reconciling similar anxieties almost all around the globe. The above inquiries have also been invaluable in my research in thinking about Turkey, an emerging nation, in this period. Along these threads, my research looks into the particular experiences of designers, makers, modernist reformers, and their heterogeneous audiences (an increasingly globalising international community on the one hand and a nationalising political community on the other) in supposedly making the state visible and recognisable during the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the rise of the modern Republic of Turkey.
