ANAMED Library Community Lectures - February

Unearthed and Dispersed: Reconstructing Antioch's Heritage through a Postcolonial Reading of the 1930s Excavations and the Recent Earthquakes

Speakers: Ezgi Erol, PhD Candidate, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna
Date & Time: 19 February 2025, Wednesday, 18:00
Location: ANAMED Library

Numerous objects from Antioch and its vicinity are held in North American museums —many neglected, uncatalogued, and left unexamined since their arrival. This situation presents a major challenge for all of us involved in researching the heritage of Antioch and its vicinity.

Moreover, said circumstances prompt critical questions: How can Western-led archaeological missions under colonial mandates be analyzed through a postcolonial lens? What epistemic insights can be learned from the incredibly fragmented dispersal of Antioch's heritage?

My lecture focuses on the "House of the Boat of Psyches," excavated in Daphne in 1934, as one case study of my dissertation. I will discuss the knowledge-generating potential of these mosaics, focusing on how their dispersal embodies shifting power relations and colonial epistemologies that continue to shape contemporary museum practices. While intersections between archaeology, postcolonial theory, and social theory have been explored for decades, Antioch studies remain underdeveloped as far as the interdisciplinarity of our field is concerned. Therefore, my talk proposes a transdisciplinary approach to discuss new perspectives on Antakya's heritage and the contemporary realities of its people.

Ezgi Erol

Ezgi Erol is an artist, curator, and researcher with master's degrees in Sociology from the University of Vienna and Fine Arts from the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. She is currently a doctoral researcher in Art Theory and Cultural Studies at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, where her dissertation, supervised by Prof. Ruth Sonderegger and Prof. Ömür Harmanşah, explores the intersections of Western aesthetics, intersectionality, and epistemic violence as reflected in the biographies of both people and objects. Since 2022, Ezgi has been a University Assistant in the Department of Transcultural Studies at the University of Applied Arts Vienna where she teaches artistic research, decolonial and feminist research methodologies. Her fieldwork spans Turkey, the USA, Lebanon, and France. She has conducted research in various archives, including those of Princeton University's Department of Art and Archaeology, the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Museum of the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures at the University of Chicago, and the Institut français du Proche-Orient (Ifpo) in Beirut, among others. Additionally, she has carried out literature research at ANAMED as part of her scholarship with the Austrian Academy of Sciences.