The last decade has seen the renewed politicization of museums, museum collections, and museum practice. This is especially true in the context of ethnographic or world cultures museums, which are often perceived to be the most inextricably entangled in colonial histories, ideology, and power relations. In efforts to decolonize the work of restitution, repair and relationship-building has become a priority for many such museums, and provenance research has taken on a heightened role in rewriting the biographies of objects, with special attention paid to establishing the circumstances of collection, informing ethical deliberations in the present. Documentation of collections is, however, often very limited and, more often than not, conventional approaches to provenance research are unable to provide certainty regarding the acquisition of collections. Provenance researchers, too, soon reach the “constitutive limits” of the colonial archive, forced to confront its absences and silences.
In this presentation, Paul Basu, professor of anthropology and curator, Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford, draws upon various case studies to rethink provenance research, shifting our attention from the forensic investigation into the origins and chains of ownership of objects to a relational process, which brings together a community of stakeholders and perspectives. The word “forensic” derives from the Latin forensis, meaning, of the forum. On the one hand, this shift decenters museum-based expertise; on the other hand, however, it opens up possibilities for contemporary conservation practice to contribute in new ways to ethical reflection, not least in destabilizing our understanding of what an object is, where it comes from, and fostering communities of care.
The lecture will be followed by a panel discussion with Erica Jones, Senior Curator of African Arts and Manager of Curatorial Affairs at the Fowler Museum at UCLA, and Glenn Wharton, Professor of Art History and Conservation of Material Culture, Chair of the UCLA/Getty Interdepartmental Program in the Conservation of Cultural Heritage.