The German Lost Art Foundation invites you to the next event in its series „Kolloquium Provenienzforschung“

On Monday, 15 September 2025, at 6 pm, Laurel Zuckerman will be talking on “Provenance and Restitution: Shared knowledge graphs as a tool in recovering looted cultural heritage and the histories of marginalized people“. The event will take place at Deutsches Zentrum Kulturgutverluste, Außenstelle Berlin, Seydelstraße 18, 10117 Berlin. It is also possible to join the event via Webex.

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.

Participation is free of charge, but only possible after registration by 12 September 2025. When registering, we kindly ask you to indicate whether you would like to participate on site or via livestream. Participants of the livestream will receive their access data on the day of the event.

Registrations to:
German Lost Art Foundation
Heinrich Natho
Humboldtstr. 12 | 39112 Magdeburg
veranstaltungen@kulturgutverluste.de

With your registration and participation, you allow the organizer to record the event and to use it for public relations and documentation (§ 22 KunstUrhG). The organizer collects, processes and uses your personal data within the scope of performing the statutory task of the German Lost Art Foundation.

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