Buket Altinoba is an art historian researching art and materiality from the late eighteenth- to the nineteenth-century, with a focus on the relationship between sculpture, craft, and industry. She is writing her second book on the topic of machines for reproducing sculpture and three-dimensional works of art, which brings together the sculptor with the engineer and the ‘objet d’art’ from both the fine and the mechanical arts. By comparing reproduction techniques developed at the height of early industrialization, she puts contextual depth to different forms of reproduction and elaborates on the entanglements while analyzing seriality and reproduction in terms of advantages and usefulness upon art. It is in this regard that she aims to examine practices and techniques in the context of mechanically reproduced objects and to interpret the sculpture machine as part of a history of reproduction in order to position it in the interplay of art, science, and technology as well as of the theory and discourse about art and its materiality.
Buket Altinoba, Dr. phil., heads the DFG-Project “Eigene Stelle” Skulpturmaschinen. Competition of Reproduction Techniques 1770-1880 at the Institute of Art History of the Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich. Previously she was Visiting Professor for “Historische Bildwissenschaft” at the University of Regensburg. She worked as a research assistant at the Institute for Art and Architectural History at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) and participated as a Fellow in the Mathilde Planck Lectureship Program at the State Academy of Fine Arts Stuttgart. Her PhD on the subject of the Istanbul Academy of Art (Dec 2012) was published under the title The Istanbul Academy of Art from its foundation until today. Modern Art, Nation Building and Cultural Transfer in Turkey (Berlin 2016). Between 2008 and 2010 she was a doctoral fellow of the Graduiertenkolleg “Image - Body - Medium. An Anthropological Perspective” at the Staatliche Hochschule für Gestaltung Karlsruhe.
She is a member of the DFG network “Entangled Histories of Art and Migration: Forms, Visibilities, Agents” funded by the German Research Society (DFG) (2018-2021); of the working group “Art Production and Art Theory under the Sign of Global Migration” (since 2013); of the DFG Research Group “Research Network for Transcultural Practices in the Arts and Humanities (RNTP)” of the Humboldt University Berlin and Ruprecht-Karls-University Heidelberg (since 2015).
