Tal Adler Sharon Macdonald (eds.) write:
Artistic provenance research (APR) mobilizes artistic approaches and sensibilities to engage with questions concerning the histories and ownership of objects, including the very modes of investigating these.
It can thus be seen as both a form of and a reflection on provenance research.
Through its distinctive methods, APR opens up new angles and perspectives on provenance, and through its production of artworks, it can make creative, challenging, and dynamic interventions into public debate.
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.
One quote from the book:
Edmund De Waal – whose books The Hare with Amber Eyes, The White Road, and Letters to Camondo each, in various ways, tell of years of careful research into the pasts of objects – explains, for instance, the importance to his work not only of ‘tracking down texts and materials in libraries and archives’ but also of attending to ‘hiddenness’.
What is not said or shown – absences and gaps – needs attention and can itself open up new avenues of investigation.
