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. Artists, anthropologists and curators offer perspectives on a recent artwork that implicates human remains, potential histories and the politics of visibility. Through theorizing historical and contemporary examples, contributors explore knowledge-imagination dynamics, and 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).