In 1923, the Republic of Turkey emerged from the wreckage of the Ottoman Empire as a nation state. In the imagination of its reforming bureaucrats, this was to be a drastically new, modern state, but in fact it was in constant negotiation with its past, at times denying it and at others reinterpreting it. Art and design practices were invaluable instruments in these imaginary negotiations with history that aimed to shape society. Painting, sculpture, photography, print culture, and festive illumination were the brick and mortar with which the top-down imaginations of the nation were built and projected to a local and global audience, as much as architectural practice. Confessions of monuments examines this crucial role of artefacts in commemorating and representing a new state, and the experiences of makers, reformers and the public in this process of cultural transformation from empire to national modernity. It proposes that myriad ways of designing the nation allowed a wider community of artists, makers, and thinkers to join the scene of nation-building. It argues that nations are not built in isolation but in negotiation with global modernity and local necessities where design practice plays a central role. It provides an essential contribution to the study of Turkish national modernity and material culture from the level of object histories.

It is a significant story of designing a nation starting from the earlier projections of Young Turks with the 1908 constitutional revolution, to the onset of post-war liberalisation in the 1950s.