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.

The publication of this work was supported by the Open Access Publication Fund of Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.