Workshop Series 2020-2021: ‘Thinking Provenance, Thinking Restitution’
Organizers: Dr Mary-Ann Middelkoop and Dr Lucy Wasensteiner
In the two decades since the 1998 ‘Washington Conference on Holocaust-Era Assets’, public awareness of Nazi era lootings, provenance research and restitution has slowly been on the rise. At Washington, governments from across the world committed to research objects in their care, and to publicise their findings with a view to achieving ‘fair and just solutions’. Museums and the art market have followed suit, with many directing new resources to investigate objects that changed hands in Europe between 1933 and 1945.
In the last five years, however, this public interest has increased exponentially. Beyond the historical focus on Nazi-era lootings, new contexts of ‘wrongful displacement’ have come into focus. In Germany for example, the country’s Lost Heritage Foundation has recently introduced state funding for research into cultural goods displaced by the East German state (2015), and in collections with colonial contexts (2018). Since 2015 new academic positions in the field of provenance research have also been established in Hamburg, Munich and Berlin. In 2018 the Centre for Provenance Research, Art and Cultural Heritage Law was established at the University of Bonn, supported by the Alfried Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach Foundation.
The time is ripe for a critical engagement with these developments, to bring together international experts and encourage Europe-wide comparison and exchange. Alongside the important technical work of establishing the facts, there is also more than ever a need for a conceptual and theoretical foundation in provenance, which reflects on the identity of objects, the agency of those involved in their movements and transactions, and the ethical challenges faced by institutions, among other aspects.
There will be six online workshops in collaboration between the Department of History of Art at the University of Cambridge and the Centre for Provenance Research, Art and Cultural Heritage Law at the University of Bonn.
For more information: http://www.daad.cam.ac.uk/workshops/thinking-provenance-thinking-restitution
The ‘Thinking Provenance, Thinking Restitution’ workshop is organised by Dr Mary-Ann Middelkoop (maem2@cam.ac.uk) and Dr Lucy Wasensteiner (lucy.wasensteiner@uni-bonn.de), and funded by the DAAD Cambridge Research Hub for German Studies.