Artistic Provenance Research

What can art and artists bring to researching the origins and biographies of objects? How do they shed new light on – or even unsettle – existing approaches to such questions? Proposing the new term – artistic provenance research – the contributors to this innovative book illuminate art’s capacity to expand provenance research in critical and provocative ways. Presenting in-depth examination of fascinating historical and contemporary examples, contributors to Artistic Provenance Research investigate knowledge-imagination dynamics, and questions of materiality, experimentation and speculation. They probe relationships between presences and absences, the aesthetic and the ontological, the scientific and the curatorial. The cases address a wide range of pressing issues of contemporary heritage research and practice, including those of colonialism and decolonization, ownership and art-markets, institutionalization, human remains, return and restitution. Through the exploration of selected artistic works in diverse media – including drama, performance, installation, photography and text – this book highlights the transformative potentials of artistic provenance research.

Tal Adler is a conceptual artist and researcher at the Centre for Anthropological Research on Museums and Heritage (CARMAH) at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. He specializes in creating collaborative, long-term projects for social transformation, engaging critically with difficult heritages, conflicts and ethical dilemmas.

Sharon Macdonald is Alexander von Humboldt professor of social anthropology at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, where she directs both the Hermann von Helmholtz-Zentrum für Kulturtechnik and CARMAH (the Centre for Anthropological Research on Museums and Heritage).