For this project, I worked with Pre-Columbian Native American shards and pottery fragments purchased on eBay that lack provenance and history such as date or site of origin. I then imagined and reconstitutes complete shapes for these ceramic fragments based on their formal characteristics. To do this, I reconstructed Persian artifacts that are catalogued as non-provenance in museums’ collections in Europe and North America.
The ceramic reconstructions are place holders for the displaced shards that are divorced from their history, their owners, and their original past, and cannot be reconstructed anymore. They address the colonial collecting histories and the ways in which objects came to be in museums’ collections.