Working in collaboration with forensic archaeologist Dr Christos Tsirogiannis, this long-term multidisciplinary project is concerned with the international traffic in looted antiquities. Since 2018, Brennan has observed and documented Tsirogiannis’ investigations, mapping the illicit antiquities network from looters to museums. By some estimations, antiquities form the largest trafficking economy after drugs and weapons.

Using data from police raids, Tsirogiannis has compiled a digital archive containing documentation of over 100,000 looted artefacts which he uses to identify objects of potentially illicit origin when they appear in auction houses, museums and galleries, often leading to the repatriation of objects. The exodus of cultural heritage through underground trafficking chains can be viewed as a continuation of colonial and imperial extraction. Ariella Azoulay writes of museums ‘For these institutions to be transformed or reformed, it is essential that looting be acknowledged as their infrastructure.’ The Goods aims to make this infrastructure visible, focusing on the meticulous work of Tsirogiannis and others to hold institutions to account and make some small repairs to the damage done by an extractive history.

The Goods takes the form of an ongoing multi-disciplinary body of work spanning moving image, sculpture, 16mm film, billboards and an ambitious online archive titled Illicit Antiquities Network (2022) that follows a series of artefacts through the trafficking chain, from looters to museums. The data from each case feeds a centralised map that visualises connections across time, location, individual and institution.