Hanna Barbara Hölling

The conservation of contemporary art consisting of unstable materials challenges the conservators with numerous questions addressing the basic notions of conservation theory. There is an urgent need to rethink conservation theory and its attendant values, as well as its four basic rules - durability, authenticity, minimal intervention and reversibility - if we are to understand the more often relations in contemporary art objects and their display. Overcoming the idea that there is a universal truth and a universal vocabulary to apply in conservation field is one of the many issues we have to consider in our field of expertise.

The focus of my study is to investigate a representative plethora of objects consisting primarily of organic materials through consequent tracing of their life spans. The method implies the investigation of those diverse life spans and creating artwork biographies on this basis. The aim is also to determine how various stakeholders influence the condition of perishable constituents by means of comparisons of diverse object's "editions" that might be found in different collections and in different display situation. As opposed to traditional art, the museum of contemporary art faces the problems of ephemeral objects, which may defy the notion of permanence and fixity. For the reason that the precise rules on how to determine the originality of exchangeable components of artworks are missing, the question of originality and authenticity will be one of the focal points of my doctoral research.