Artistic Provenance Research - Cultural Heritage Studies by Tal Adler & Sharon MacDonald Paperback

About the Book

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.

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

»A profound act of rehumanization. These pages show how art can turn inventory numbers back into people, and collections back into contested sites of memory and care.«-- "Yael Bartana, artist and filmmaker"

»At a time when provenance research is still haunted by the power of the colonial archive to hide its own violence, haunted by its absences and erasures, this brilliant book shows the importance of artistic practice to help us see what has long been unseen, ignored and forgotten. This is a powerful call to take the speculative, the imaginative, and the poetic seriously as we try to rehumanize those who have long been dehumanized by colonialism in the past but also today.«-- "Wayne Modest, Director of Content, National Museum of World Cultures"

About the Author

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).