Kunstmuseum Basel in Basel, SwitzerlandDukas/Universal Images Group via Getty Images.

Swiss Government to Fund Research into Holdings of Cultural Artifacts

by · ARTnews

The Swiss government will provide $2.4 million in funding for research into the provenance of objects in its museums and collections, the Swiss Federal Office of Culture announced earlier this week. Funding for 26 projects from 2027–2028 was awarded following a public call for proposals.

A core focus will be on items acquired by Swiss institutions in colonial, archaeological, and Nazi-era contexts. The winning projects range from initiatives involving several museums to collaborations with communities of origin to the individual cataloging of archives and databases.

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Participants include major museums as well as collections with limited experience in provenance research. The aim is to help a variety of institutions gain insights into the origins of their collections, providing a basis for further actions.

For example, $120,000 will fund a collaboration between the Natural History Museum in Basel and the Gadjah Mada University in Indonesia. The project will trace the provenance of 189 Indonesian human remains in the Natural History Museum’s collection, the circumstances of their acquisition, and their potential descendent communities, with the aim of establishing a basis for restitution dialogues.

A further $120,000 will go to a joint project involving nine Swiss museums, including the Museum of Cultures Basel and the Bern Historical Museum. Together, the institutions will research over 6,300 artifacts from Cameroon held in their collections. The focus, according to their proposal, will be on contexts of appropriation, chains of ownership, and the significance of the artifacts to contemporary Cameroon.

Funding will also go into research into Nazi-looted art, with several art museums investigating works from the Nazi era with unclear provenance. The Kunstmuseum Basel will receive $120,000 to examine 336 drawings in its collection with provenances previously flagged as problematic, as well as the fates of the drawings’ sellers and the museum’s collection strategies between 1933 and 1945.