Encounters in Absence: Curating Byzantium Beyond the Dazzling Authentic

Compared to the 1990s, the last twenty-five years have seen a significant transformation in the public display of Byzantium in Istanbul, which is visible across new excavation sites, monuments, and exhibitions. This transformation appears to have a number of parameters, and its central axis is the public reception. The emergence of Istanbul as a “spectacle” in the early 2000s driven by political aspirations regarding the European Union and UNESCO, might have played a role in the merging of culture and tourism under a single ministry in 2003, leading to the former becoming increasingly dependent on the latter. Increased international interest in Istanbul also created a niche interest in Byzantium, albeit one focused almost exclusively on its Constantinopolitan past. This surge in interest and funding was epitomized in 2010, when Istanbul became European Capital of Culture. Concurrently, the non-state actors—particularly private museums, research centres, and private universities—rushed into Istanbul’s culture scene. At the same time, public engagement with Byzantium in Istanbul has experienced what we call a “Material Turn”, and a “Historiographical Turn”. The Material Turn involves displaying Byzantium without defecting to material lavishness of the Byzantine elite or collections holding significant pieces. This entailed placing high value on digital and mechanical reproductions as exhibits. This phenomenon occasionally even approaches what Roland Betancourt formulated as Neon Byzantium: A Byzantine aesthetic that lacks direct reference to the source material. This Material Turn, combined with the diversification of topics within Byzantine studies, which is caused by the flourishing of graduate programs in Byzantine studies in Turkey, brought about the Historiographical Turn. In the absence of sui generis value of the authentic exhibit item, the focus shifts towards the exhibition narrative itself, the writing of history, which gains greater prominence, paving the way for more varied storytelling approaches. This is observable particularly in the contemporary art exhibitions with connections to Byzantium, and in the rising interest in its reception in popular culture. In this talk, we argue that the way Byzantium is encountered in Istanbul today has changed and now defined by multiple dichotomies regarding the access to source/authentic material, the inclusivity of themes, and the sustainability of cultural production.