Lecture with Dr. Vikramāditya Prakāsh

The term ‘provenance’ refers to the origin of an object, as well as its record of ownership. In the international art market, it is often used to establish or increase a work’s value. In this lecture, Dr. Vikramāditya Prakash uses Amie Siegel’s 2013 work Provenance—which examines the global trade in modernist furniture from architect Le Corbusier’s controversial planned city of Chandigarh, India—as a starting point to discuss, and dispute, the claimed provenance of the objects at the center of Siegel’s film.

A still from Amie Siegel, “Provenance,” 2013 - A still from a new film depicts the furniture Pierre Jeanneret designed for Chandigarh in Paris at an auction preview. Amie Siegel, “Provenance,” 2013, HD Video, Color/Sound (Still), courtesy of the artist and Simon Preston Gallery, New York © Amie Siegel
About the presenter:  Dr. Vikramāditya Prakāsh, author of Chandigarh's Le Corbusier: The Struggle for Modernity in Postcolonial India, is an architect, an architectural historian, and theorist who currently teaches at the University of Washington. He works on issues of modernism, post-colonialism, and the global history of architecture. Prakāsh grew up in Chandigarh, India, and lives in Seattle with his wife and three children. He is currently working on Deruralization: The Modernist City in the Age of Globalization (Routledge: 2017).