17/09/2025
Dr. Fatma Coşkuner, Head of Education and Learning Programmes at The Sakıp Sabancı Museum, has contributed an article entitled “Meditating on Aivazovsky’s Black Sea: Representing Russian Imperial Expansion” to the edited volume The Routledge Companion to Art and the Formation of Empire, published by Routledge.
The article offers a critical reassessment of Ivan Aivazovsky’s artistic practice, situating his portrayals of the Black Sea within the wider framework of nineteenth-century Russian imperial expansion. Using his 1881 painting Black Sea as a focal point, Dr. Coşkuner examines the seascape not merely as an aesthetic category, but as a conduit for imperial ideologies, a symbolic site in the reconfiguration of borders, and a medium through which identity is both articulated and contested.
Aivazovsky’s depictions of the Black Sea are explored through the interrelated themes of nature, belonging, geographical imagination, and political representation, contributing to current debates on liminality and maritime imaginaries. Within this interpretive framework, the artist’s paintings emerge as resonant visual documents in the construction of imperial narratives.
Five works by Aivazovsky in The Sakıp Sabancı Museum Collection serve as significant witnesses to this historical and artistic context, enabling a richer and more layered reading of the artist’s oeuvre.
Access the abstract here; the full article is available in The Routledge Companion to Art and the Formation of Empire, via Sabancı University Library.
About Dr. Fatma Coşkuner
Dr. Coşkuner earned her BA and MA degrees in History from Boğaziçi University, followed by a second MA from the European University at St. Petersburg. In 2021, she completed her PhD at Koç University with a dissertation entitled On the Threshold of the Black Sea: Intersecting Identity and Discourses of Empire in the Paintings of Ivan Konstantinovich Aivazovsky.
Her early research addressed Ottoman–Russian relations through the lens of the Crimean War, while her doctoral work investigated the intersections of empire, identity, and spatial imagination in the oeuvre of Armenian-Russian painter Ivan K. Aivazovsky. During her doctoral studies, she undertook extensive primary source and archival research in Moscow, St. Petersburg, Paris, London, and Feodosia. She also completed a curatorial internship at the Oriental Art Department at the National Museum in Warsaw, thereby deepening her expertise in curatorial methodologies and cross-cultural art historical research within an international institutional setting.
Dr. Coşkuner has taught courses in art history and architectural history at Koç University, Sabancı University, and other institutions. She currently serves as Head of Education, Learning Programmes, and Events at Sabancı University’s Sakıp Sabancı Museum.
