City on the Edge
Two Lands / Two Seas II: Istanbul

In the second week of October 2024, fifteen scholars from many countries, working in art history and adjacent disciplines, will gather in Istanbul for this year’s KHI Summer School. We will visit many sites, meet with scholars and other experts to explore the unique historical trajectory of a city on the edge, connecting two continents and two seas.

Since Ottoman times, Istanbul has been described as a city between two lands and two seas (al barrayn wa al bahrayn). But it is not only a city on the edge of continents and bodies of water. It is precariously placed between tectonic plates; between seismic geopolitical forces; between the push of global capitalism and the pull of tradition. The 2024 KHI Summer School will reflect on Istanbul’s distinctively long, complex, and intertwined histories, present, and futures. Once Second Rome and the seat of Ottoman court, the cosmopolitan city has been sacked, invaded, occupied, built and rebuilt many times. Its journeys through time thus radiate many layers of construction, conversion, disfiguration, erasure, and transculturation. As an urban site of collective memory, it also embodies, relatedly, many traumas and contradictions. At once unprincipled and preposterous, it is also captivatingly beautiful.

Situating Istanbul’s layered history and geopolitical position in conversation with myths, legends, literature, and theories of urbanization and globalization, this summer school will consider the art, environment, urban development, heritage, as well as the cultural and economic capital of the vast city. What threads unite and separate its relationship to historical scales and acts of domination, memories and encounters? How has it engaged with forced or self-imposed change, disasters, and violence on human, animal, and plant ecologies? And, from the point of view of art history, what perspectives can be offered in considering its urban trajectories? In what ways can literature, music, and food interconnect with art and architecture to resist artificial borders to experience the city, and offer alternative projections for the futures of Istanbul?