Between 2021 and 2025, a team of researchers in museums and at universities in the Netherlands, of artists , critical friends, winter school participants and many others from around the world have been collaborating in the research project Pressing Matter – Ownership, Value and the Question of Colonial Heritage in Museums. It is their ambition that the network that emerged from the project will remain intact, in order to continue the discussions on what they label as ‘Critical Provenance Research’.  This Series of their Provenance Research Reports is one of the means to maintain and also extend this network.

As an integral part of the work, the provenance researchers, PhD researchers and Postdoc researchers in Pressing Matter have added historical and other provenance information to numerous objects. They were used in discussions on focused case studies, detailed inventories as well as provenance reflections. These are in and for themselves relevant, whereas together they also form some of the building blocks for the overall intervention that Pressing Matter hopes to present in early 2026 in an edited volume. In addition, this Provenance Research Reports Series is also published in 2025 to show the variety of approaches to provenance research on specific objects, collections, collectors, and regions. Each of the 4 issues shows work in progress and will be compiled as web publications.

Threads of Time #1