The former House of the Fascist Party in Predappio, Benito Mussolini’s birthplace, was inaugurated in 1937. Its tower still contains the large bronze bell once used in Fascist political and civic ceremonies, together with its then state-of-the-art electromagnetic striker. Several times a year, hundreds of neo-fascists march through the streets of Predappio, passing through the abandoned building, which has been slated for conservation since the early 2000s.

Fragile Power begins with this resonant building and imagines the completion of its restoration. The original bell is removed and replaced by an exact replica made entirely of crystal glass. Its powerful 1930s striking mechanism is restored to full working condition and carefully attached to the new bell. A wireless activation system is housed in a custom-made briefcase, which, at the ceremonial reopening of the building, is handed over to political leadership.

This restoration narrative is presented as a promotional film whose affirmative language is complicated by references to the entanglements of glamour and power, Fascism and fashion. The work exposes a fundamental tension in the conservation of contested heritage: while material intervention can stabilize foundations and polish facades, their uses and meanings become increasingly contingent on the interplay between their inherent legacies and the sociopolitical contexts enveloping them. Fragile Power turns this tension into an open-ended game of possible futures, leaving the viewer to consider who might ring the bell, under what circumstances, and with what consequences.

Film stills, exhibition views and documentation: Click to enlarge

Artistic Provenance Research (APR) mobilizes artistic methods and sensibilities to engage with questions concerning the histories and ownership of objects and collections, including human remains and ancestors. APR can be both a form of provenance research and a reflection on how provenance research is conducted.

The concept of APR emerged through Adler’s project Who is ID8470?, which began in 2019 around an unidentified human skull in the anatomical collection of the Charité in Berlin. When attempts to initiate conventional provenance research through the institutions concerned were unsuccessful, the artistic-research project itself commissioned, funded, managed and hosted scientific provenance research as an integral part of its work. Reflecting on what this meant for both artistic research and provenance led Adler to coin the term Artistic Provenance Research. The concept was first presented publicly in 2022.

APR is deeply grounded in research, but expands the questions, methods and forms through which provenance can be investigated. It can work with archival and object-based research as well as collaboration, autobiographical reflection, artistic speculation and other ways of addressing gaps, absences and conflicting accounts. Its capacity to incorporate indeterminacy and ambiguity makes it possible to engage with aspects of an object’s history that cannot necessarily be resolved through documentary evidence alone. APR is not an alternative to conventional provenance research; it can work alongside it, support or initiate it, while also questioning its assumptions and limitations. 

Adler developed the concept further together with Sharon Macdonald through research, discussions and examples of related practices by other artists and researchers. Their co-edited, open-access book Artistic Provenance Research, published by transcript in 2025, brings these approaches together and introduces APR into wider debate and practice.

Adler continues to employ and develop APR through his work with collections, archives and contested histories.

Selected pages from the book: Click to enlarge

The project began in 2019 with a disagreement among the curators of the Humboldt Lab at the Humboldt Forum in Berlin. They were considering exhibiting an unidentified human skull from the Anatomical Collection of the Charité, marked with phrenological inscriptions according to the theories of Franz Joseph Gall. The skull had already appeared in numerous scientific exhibitions, commonly referred to as the ‘Gall skull’, while nothing was known about the person to whom it had belonged.

Based on his work on Dead Images, a long-term project on the histories, ethics and politics of collections of human remains, Tal Adler was invited by Humboldt Lab curator Friedrich von Bose to a consultation meeting with the curatorial team. Adler proposed an artistic research project that would turn the curatorial dilemma itself into the subject of inquiry and would avoid exhibiting the skull – shifting attention from Gall and phrenology towards the unidentified person whose remains had become a collection and exhibition object.

When the Humboldt Lab opened in 2021, the skull’s now empty showcase was replaced by a Pepper’s Ghost installation containing a two-channel video. At its centre were encounters with spirits who claimed the skull as their own, alongside interviews with the living addressing the curatorial conflict, anatomical collections, phrenology, provenance and the ethics of displaying human remains. The installation remained at the Humboldt Lab until 2025.

The inquiry continued beyond the exhibition. When Adler’s attempts to initiate conventional provenance research through the institutions concerned were unsuccessful, Who is ID8470? itself commissioned, funded, managed and hosted that research. Reflecting on these processes led Adler to coin the term Artistic Provenance Research (APR).

Four chapters in the book Artistic Provenance Research provide complementary accounts of the project. Tal Adler’s ‘Who is ID8470?’ traces its development from the initial invitation through the exhibition and subsequent research, while ‘We Are ID8470’ focuses on the encounters with the spirits and the historical research into their biographies. Friedrich von Bose’s ‘Intervening Potentials’ examines the curatorial conflict and collaboration from the perspective of the curator who initiated the invitation. Marion A. Hulverscheidt’s ‘Searching for Fingerprints on ID 8470’ presents the scientific provenance research commissioned by the project.

Exhibition views and film stills: Click to enlarge

The Creative Co-Production (CCP) is a model for collaborative artistic, scientific, and institutional teamwork, developed specifically for engagements with contentious cultural heritage. Developed by Tal Adler in 2015, the CCP addresses the limitations of traditional short-term artistic interventions often commissioned and hosted by heritage institutions. Unlike these brief engagements, the CCP fosters long-term, multidisciplinary cooperation among artists, researchers, heritage custodians, and affected communities to pursue significant and sustainable transformations in the ways contentious histories are interpreted and disseminated.

The CCP model was first implemented in the framework of the TRACES (Transmitting Contentious Cultural Heritages with the Arts – from Intervention to Co-Production) project that received funding from the EU Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme from 2016 to 2019. Under this framework, Adler set up and coordinated five CCP teams, which over a period of three years, engaged with difficult heritages encompassing different social, political and geographical contexts.

Around these five CCPs, the TRACES consortium, spread across 11 partners in 10 countries in Europe, explored different aspects of the CCPs’ work such as artistic methods, ethnographic reflections, pedagogical affordances, and impacts on contentious collections. Adler was also a member of one of the five CCPs, Dead Images, which brought his ten-year engagement with two anthropological collections at the Natural History Museum Vienna to completion.

The work of TRACES and its five CCPs was brought together in the open-access publication Contentious Cultural Heritages and Arts: A Critical Companion (2021). Adler contributed ‘The Creative Co-Production: An Experimental Model for Artistic Engagements with Contentious Cultural Heritage’; ‘Dead Images: Facing the History, Ethics and Politics of European Skull Collections’, with Linda Fibiger, John Harries, Joan Smith, Anna Szöke and Maria Teschler-Nicola; and ‘Reflexive Photography and the Transformation of Shock: An Interview’, with John Harries.

Context and documentation: Click to enlarge

The project began in 2009 with an encounter between Tal Adler and a 30-metre-long glass-faced cabinet in the department of anthropology at the Natural History Museum Vienna. Behind the glass, from floor to ceiling, more than 8,000 human skulls were arranged on shelves, numbered and inventoried and facing the glass – or the windows in front of the cabinet.

Facing the cabinet, shocked and amazed, Adler heard from Margit Berner – curator at the department of anthropology – about the ways in which the skulls ended up on these shelves. He learned that these were merely a part of a collection of human bones of over 40,000 individuals kept inside boxes, stored in different locations at the museum. He heard about a century-long frenzy for skulls fed through military, scientific, and colonial expeditions; missionary networks; private trade; looted graves; war hospitals and prisoner camps; Nazi extermination facilities; and various kinds of excavations and exhumations.

Stepping closer and gazing at one skull, and then at another, Adler saw the individuals they were. He started to think about the people they used to be, how each had a name, a life with passions, problems, family, projects. Stepping back to grasp the entire cabinet – the silent lives amassed in it, arranged densely and orderly – was overwhelming. A ten-year project unfolded around this initial shock.

In 2012, after gaining research funding, Adler returned to photograph the cabinet to create a highly detailed life-size panorama of it. He then returned to the museum with a question: what was behind the large wooden doors in the middle of the cabinet, interrupting the repeating pattern of skulls on shelves?

The answer provided Adler’s second realization, or shock, in front of the cabinet. Maria Teschler-Nicola – head of the anthropology department at the time – accompanied him to the cabinet and unlocked the wooden doors. Behind them, a big room was revealed: the department’s historical photographic laboratory (darkroom), established during National Socialism. With darkroom techniques becoming obsolete, the room was now being converted to store the department’s large photographic collection of over 50,000 items. These included images of thousands of living people – among them Indigenous people, performers in human shows, prisoners of war, and Holocaust victims – photographed and classified as biological specimens, or criminals, through racist research protocols.

This discovery sharpened Adler’s dilemma about the panorama he had just created: Using the panorama to create a public discussion around such collections and their troubled histories, could the critical image reproduce the objectification it sought to address? Would exhibiting the panorama repeat the violence of exposure, dispossession, and dehumanization? And as the project intended to involve descendants of people whose skulls were in the collection, would they be offended by, or object to, the display of an image of their ancestors’ remains?

These questions became the basis of Dead Images. In 2016, with research and innovation funding from the EU Horizon 2020 programme, an interdisciplinary group of artists, anthropologists, archaeologists, and historians formed around the project. Together with museum professionals, researchers, representatives of descendant communities and others concerned with such collections, they investigated different, sometimes conflicting positions on the collection, research, display, and return of human remains.

The process culminated in a large exhibition at Edinburgh College of Art in 2018. Rather than resolving the dilemmas that had shaped the project, the exhibition incorporated them as its core rationale, extending the questioning from the collections and their histories to the photograph, the curatorial process and the experiences of the visitors themselves.

Explore the project: Click to view individual pages

Ethnographic museums often have a difficult history of collecting, research and display. Many objects found in such museums were acquired, or looted, in the context of colonialism. The history of racially motivated research and expropriation, and the problems of interpreting and representing ‘the Other’, are often invisible in the display of these objects.

Against this background, in late 2014, Adler and historian and art-educator Karin Schneider were invited by the Weltmuseum Wien to develop a concept for a public outreach project during the period when the museum was closed for renovations. Working with the museum’s curators Claudia Augustat and Jani Kuhnt-Saptodewo and the Viennese cultural institution Brunnenpassage, Sharing Stories was developed through an interdisciplinary collaboration based on Adler’s artistic concept.

Between 2015 and 2017, 10 pop-up stations in Vienna invited the public to bring an object meaningful to them and tell its story. A dedicated interview format developed for the project generated approximately 150 personal accounts. From simple, everyday objects such as a key or a necklace, to rare objects such as a box for a missing film or a handmade ritual mask, participants shared stories of love and friendship, loss and longing, belonging and alienation, faith, passion, migration, terror, assimilation, and hope. An open-access archive of the objects’ photographs and summaries of their stories gradually developed on the museum’s website. The objects themselves were not collected by the museum but remained with their owners.

From these 150 stories, 20 were selected for further development. Adler photographed the objects, mostly in the places where their owners kept them, creating a series titled Object Portraits. The original interviews were expanded into filmed conversations with the owners. In addition, other contributors were also filmed, offering their own perspectives on each object, introducing different interpretations and forms of knowledge alongside the owners’ accounts. Rather than producing a definitive interpretation of each object, these different perspectives were presented alongside one another, allowing their relationships, agreements and contradictions to emerge.

The project culminated in an exhibition at the reopened Weltmuseum Wien in 2017. The exhibition presented the Object Portraits series, two interactive media stations featuring filmed conversations with the objects’ owners and additional contributors, and a four-channel video projection combining images of the objects with excerpts from the interviews. An accompanying book brought together photographs of all 150 objects and summaries of their owners’ stories.

Exhibition views and selected works: Click to enlarge

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The project explores Austrian sites whose difficult histories remain unsettled, contested, neglected or buried. A series of photographs, usually exhibited alongside an open archive, reveal burdened landscapes in which history, memory and commemoration are an ongoing political process. A bubble level (spirit level, Wasserwaage) positioned in the foreground of the image renders the landscapes as soft, slightly out-of-focus backgrounds.

The bubble level is a measurement tool – it is the precondition for leveling grounds and the construction of new realities. Embedded in the photographic apparatus itself, the level provides visual assurance and a sense of reliability, granting a ‘natural’ perception of the scenery. Landscape, one of the first and most captured subjects of photography, is neither neutral nor natural or innocent.

Leveled Landscapes investigates how politics of memory and commemoration shape landscapes. It portrays the way national processes of narration and myth construct our perception of landscapes, the way we capture them, render them, and live in them.

Selected works: Click to view individual pages

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