Light and Relic: Conceptual Provenance Study

Light and Relic is a conceptual art project that documents the transformation of the Arknight Shard, a former trading-card object, into a cultural artefact through a structured process of material, photographic, and provenance-based intervention. The work does not treat the physical object as the artwork itself; instead, the artwork is the documented process of recontextualization, in which the object’s meaning shifts from functional classification to cultural and conceptual significance. The project employs detailed photographic surface analysis, sequential provenance documentation, and the integration of material craft (in collaboration with blacksmith artist Andreas Rimkus) to produce a verifiable record of transformation. This approach positions the resulting artefact not as a collectible or commodity, but as the material trace of a conceptual operation. The theoretical framework underlying the transformation is informed by the SOZ (Self-Optimization Cycle) model, which is used not in a therapeutic or psychological capacity, but strictly as a structural system for meaning-making and semantic reclassification within conceptual art practice. The SOZ provides the procedural scaffold that links perception, interpretation, material action, and documentation, allowing the project to articulate provenance as an ongoing act of sense-making rather than as a retroactive record of origin. By combining material culture analysis, conceptual art methodology, and structured provenance, Light and Relic proposes a model of artefactual identity in which value arises from process, context, and interpretation, rather than rarity, preservation, or market evaluation.