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via Observer, 01 July 2024: Provenance research is increasingly vital for museum repatriation efforts. The Art Institute of Chicago’s recent return of a 12th-century artifact to Thailand highlighting ongoing challenges in tracing the origins of cultural objects and the complexities of repatriation.
Another day, another object from a museum’s permanent collection leaving that collection to return to from whence it was taken. In a recent case, that object is a carved wood column, part of the side of a doorframe that dates to the 12th Century and was illegally removed from the Phanom Rung shrine to the Hindu god Shiva in northeast Thailand. Returning the pilaster fragment is the Art Institute of Chicago, where it had been on long-term loan since 1996 and officially entered the museum’s permanent collection in 2017. The process of returning the object to Thailand began on June 18th. The museum has some familiarity with the Phanom Rung shrine, having previously returned another looted object—the Vishnu lintel—to the same temple in 1988. That lintel was restored to the structure, and presumably the pilaster will be as well.
Righting a historical wrong is a good thing, although the process of repatriating cultural property that’s been wrongly removed from a nation in the developing world, whether by looting or illegal excavation or accidental (or intentional) misidentification on import and export documents, can take months or even years and is accomplished one object at a time. One issue is that the history of what happened to and with these objects is so often obscured—with details including their original location and owners or stewards being sometimes near impossible to determine. How an artifact ended up in an institution’s permanent collection can be equally tough to figure out. It is almost always the case that such items have passed through various hands, including dealers, auctioneers, private buyers and other museums. It is often only when an object is written about or shown, perhaps in an auction catalogue or museum periodical, that someone from its country of origin will make a claim.
