Opinion: by walking out of Berlin's Neues Museum with an illicit 3D scan of the bust of Queen Nefertiti, a pair of artists has forced us to question whether conservation is an act of care or a radical form of repression, says Sam Jacob.

Conservation is often misunderstood as a practice concerned with the past. Really though, like the best science fiction, the subject of conservation is the present. Or more exactly, it is the site of intersection for ideas about the past, framed within the morality and ideology of the present. Its tools and techniques, for example, are both highly traditional and cutting-edge. Think of the conservation studio like a cross between an emergency room and a medieval workshop. A place where X-rays and linseed oil converge. And now, of course, where digital technologies too join the deployed to image, scan and otherwise document the artefacts of human culture. Last October, two artists walked into the Neues Museum, Berlin, and walked out with the bust of Queen Nefertiti. Then gave it away. Nora Al-Badri and Jan Nikolai Nelles had 3D scanned the bust without the museum's permission, then uploaded the data as a torrent as part of a project titled The Other Nefertiti (top image). A 3D print of the bust produced by the artists is now permanently on show in the American University of Cairo, this new version repatriated as a digital ghost, a solid shadow displaced in time and space.
Think of the conservation studio like a cross between an emergency ...