Virtual Book Launch for "Artistic Provenance Research"

Thinking Through the Museum presents a virtual book launch for "Artistic Provenance Research" by Tal Adler and Sharon Macdonald.

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.

Join Editors Tal Adler and Sharon Macdonald to discuss their new book "Artistic Provenance Research". Moderated by Dr. Cara Krmpotich, the conversation will touch on the urgent concerns in contemporary heritage research and practice such as colonialism and decolonization, ownership and art-markets, institutionalization, human remains, return and restitution.

This event is hosted by Thinking Through the Museum and supported in part by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and Concordia University.

Learn more about the book + free PDF download

Learn more about Thinking Through the Museum

Tal Adler is a conceptual artist and researcher developing long-term artistic engagements with difficult histories, conflicted communities, and contested heritages through collaboration, participation, and multiperspectivity. He has worked at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin’s Centre for Anthropological Research on Museums and Heritage (CARMAH), and Centre for Advanced Study inherit. heritage in transformation, leading artistic research on memory, commemoration, and the ethics and politics of collecting and displaying human remains.

Sharon Macdonald is Alexander von Humboldt Professor of Social Anthropology at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, she directs the Centre for Cultural Techniques and co-directs the Centre for Advanced Study inherit. heritage in transformation, and was founding director of the Centre for Anthropological Research on Museums and Heritage (CARMAH). In all of these, she has been concerned to foster innovative research and practice, including artistic research. Her wide-ranging writing, especially on difficult heritage, memory politics and museum transformations is internationally known.

Cara Krmpotich is Professor and Associate Dean, Faculty Life, in the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto. Her research and teaching focus on critical collections management, decolonializing and Indigenizing museum practices, repatriation and community-engaged practice. She is Co-Director of the Great Lakes Research Alliance (GRASAC), and with Alice Stevenson, co-editor of Collections Management as Critical Museum Practice. She has worked in collections roles in museums in Canada and the UK.