Gala Porras-Kim is a Colombian-Korean artist born in Bogota in 1982 and currently lives in Los Angeles, her home since she was a child. Her research-based practice analyzes the political, social, economic, and religious contexts that have determined the value of objects during colonialism. She is particularly interested in human relics, and immaterial goods from ancient cultures turned into cultural trophies under Western political and intellectual supremacy.
She is primarily known for her site-specific projects in museums and historical collections. She studies and traces the circulation of artifacts as much as the stored, nomenclatural and classification methodologies pursued by cultural institutions. According to Porras-Kim, museums have constantly failed to properly communicate the moral, historical, and scientific implications of separating an item from its original context. Through different studio cases, Porras-Kim reframes the stories behind the objects, giving them a second life, and raising the question: Who is the owner of the past? Should this be the sole responsibility of experts and institutions?
In the first comprehensive exhibition of Porras-Kim on the East Coast, she presents works drawn from key projects over the past decade, and a newly commissioned project, still a work-in-progress. The proposed work is an installation that searches the various laws that have moved the objects dredged from the cenote at Chichen Itza, a sacred Maya’s site in the Yucatan peninsula of Mexico, to their current location at the Peabody Museum in Harvard University, where they were installed during the first years of the XX century. Porras-Kim is working with lawyers to take legal action to return the relics into the cenote. The proposed litigation will be quite unique, using material and supernatural documents to support the legal case for Chaac, the Mayan rain god, as being the true and original owner of the objects.
The artist exposes the manipulations behind current acquisition laws for historic indigenous cultural objects and proposes creating new legislative paradigms for the protection and restitution of cultural property under equality principles.
Aware of these constructs, Gala Porras-Kim considers the lives and stories of the artifacts, raising questions about how objects speak, for whom, and for what purposes. The exhibition centers on four recent installations, three of which are new commissions: Asymptote Towards an Ambiguous Horizon (2021), Precipitation for an Arid Landscape (2021), and Leaving the Institution Through Cremation Is Easier than as a Result of a Deaccession Policy (2021). Joining these is Proposal for the Reconstituting of Ritual Elements for the Sun Pyramid at Teotihuacán (2019). These projects are set in dialogue with several earlier, complementary works, which establish a deeper context of the artist’s practice.
Gala Porras-Kim carried out part of her research for this exhibition while being a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies at Harvard University (2019–2020) and as Artist in Residence at the Getty Research Institute (2020-2022). We would like to thank the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University for providing access to the archival material showcased in this exhibition. This exhibition is organized and produced by Amant in cooperation with KADIST and is curated by Ruth Estévez and Adam Kleinman.
Exhibition Guides and Spanish Translations
Letters to institutions
Since 2019, Gala Porras-Kim has written several letters to prompt museums and archaeological institutes to reconsider the way in which they make conservation and restoration decisions. In her writing, Gala suggests the objects’ intended destiny might be distinct from the one imposed by the institution. She invites her addressees to think together with her about speculative proposals that try to return dignity and personhood to the people whose objects and remains are now kept in controlled conservation. These letters have become an integral part of her artwork. Thus far, the Peabody Museum in Cambridge is the only institution that has responded to her correspondence. Three of the letters published here are featured in our exhibition.
Leaving the institution through cremation is easier than as a result of a deaccession policy
Letter to Mr. Alexander Kellner, Director, National Museum of Brazil Los Angeles, July 31st, 2021.
Mediating with the rain
Letter to Ms. Jane Pickering, William and Muriel Seabury Howells Director, Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology, Harvard University, New York City, November 20, 2021.
Proposal for the reconstituting of ritual elements of the Sun Pyramid at Teotihuacan
Letter to Mr. Juan Manuel Garibay Barrera, National Coordinator of Museums and Expositions in Mexico, Los Angeles, January 20, 2019.
A terminal escape from the place that binds us
Letter to Ms. Soomi Lee, Director Gwangju National Museum, Los Angeles, February 16th, 2021
Reading of Gala Porras-Kim’s Letters to Museum Officials
- (0:00/ -11:58) Letter to Alexander Kellner, National Museum of Brazil;
- (2:44/ -09:13) Letter to Jane Pickering, Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology;
- (6:19/ -05:39) Letter to Juan Manuel Garibay Barrera, National Institute of Archaeology and History, Mexico City;
- (9:03/ -02:56) Letter to Soomi Lee, Director Gwangju National Museum.
About the Artist
Gala Porras-Kim was born in Bogota, Colombia, and is based in Los Angeles, where she received an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts and an MA in Latin American Studies from UCLA. Her research-based practice focuses on the social and cultural contexts that shape how sounds, language, and history have been represented in a variety of disciplines, from linguistics to history and museum conservation.
