Contemporary art institutions are challenged with collecting, presenting and conserving artworks that contravene the boundaries of collections care protocol. Complex artworks are often ephemeral, evolving or expanding; and in some cases, distinct elements of artworks are sourced from or dispersed into other artworks, or even among the museum-going public. To care for such works, conservation researchers have looked outside of their discipline for theories that may inspire new conservation practices. A ‘biographical approach’ to conservation (Van de Vall et al. 2011) attempts to record the variability of artworks through significant life stages while preserving their artistic integrity over time. Borrowing from social scientific theories on material culture, this approach opens up a dialogue with other disciplines to foster new ways of understanding artworks and new ways of caring for them. In this article, the crossdisciplinary trend is continued with the addition of another anthropological theory – that of dividual personhood, reenvisioned as ‘dividual art-hood’ – to the biographical approach to conservation. Through examples of relational art and spiritual-aesthetic installations of altars in museums, this paper introduces the notions of ‘dividuality’, ‘partibility’ and ‘individuation’, and demonstrates how those concepts provide a new vocabulary for the writing of artwork biographies and a new paradigm for the care of unconventional works of art and cultural expression.