“Provenance and Restitution: Shared knowledge graphs as a tool in recovering looted cultural heritage and the histories of marginalized people“ | Kolloquium Provenienzforschung

In the provenance records of looted art, key names often go missing. A striking example is the widespread deletion of Jewish Holocaust victims from the history of the artworks they owned, even if their ownership was well documented before the Nazi era. The erasure of looting victims poses a challenge to historians of cultural heritage across multiple domains. This talk focuses on digital tools and practical tips for identifying, retrieving and restoring erased memories and tracking the art market networks involved. The use of Wikidata to connect information stored in different databases and to visualize hidden networks will be demonstrated.

A case study of the Perls dynasty of art dealers will illustrate intersections in the itineraries of looted European and African objects. Identifying patterns of erasures with digital tools can yield valuable insights for art historians, museum professionals, cultural heritage scholars and restitution experts in the interconnected domains of colonial plunder, Nazi looting and antiquities trafficking.

Laurel Zuckerman's work currently focuses on the art world and the Holocaust. She explores how knowledge graphs, NLP, AI and the digital tools and techniques of investigative data journalism can help research art looting networks. A former IT project manager and claimant in an art restitution case (Zuckerman v Metropolitan Museum of Art), Zuckerman is the editor of Open Art Data.