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.
It is important, at the outset, to emphasize that by APR, we do not mean provenance research that is conducted about artworks. While APR might address the provenance of artworks, it can also be concerned with other kinds of objects, ideas, or topics connected with provenance (such as the very notion of ownership or the politics and dynamics of provenance research).
Deeply grounded in research, APR produces artistic processes and artworks that promote and enable new forms of research and knowledge production, as well as reflection on – and potentially activating change in relation to – other forms of provenance research.
Questions of provenance – and provenance research – are of vital importance to heritage debates and heritage practice.
They are part 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.
All of these are addressed through historical and contemporary case studies in this book.
