Preserving to forget: Ottoman-Armenian art and the politics of museum taxonomies

Drawing on ongoing ethnographic and archival research on how art dispossessed in episodes of state violence against non-Muslims in the late Ottoman Empire and the early Turkish republic has shaped the knowledge production on (post-)Ottoman heritage, this article revisits past and present articulations of the idea of preservation that is central to the making of heritage and its institution. The analysis is anchored in two kindred Ottoman-Armenian objects: egg-shaped ceramic ornaments dated to the eighteenth century, one displayed in the Tiled Pavilion Museum, Istanbul, the other at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City. In Istanbul, the ornament is seemingly designated as a ‘mosque decoration’; its Armenian provenance is denied. In New York, the ornament is correctly labelled as Armenian, and yet another kind of miscategorization is at work here as well as it is located in the Byzantine Gallery. Taking the museum and UNESCO as key institutional formations in debates on preservation, I posit that the preservation of the ceramic eggs is predicated on ‘misattribution’ in the first and ‘misdating’ in the second case, and argue that the preservation paradigm both facilitates and is contingent on epistemic forgetting: It not only veils a particular way of asserting ownership rooted in violence and dispossession, but also upholds institutional and disciplinary boundaries within the knowledge production on heritage.