Gala Porras-Kim

About Gala's Work

Gala Porras-Kim is an interdisciplinary artist proposing new ways to make visible the layered meanings and functions of cultural artifacts held in museums and institutional collections. With nuance, empathy, and, at times, playfulness, Porras-Kim probes the methods institutions use to classify, conserve, and interpret items in their collections. Her research-intensive practice focuses on objects and forms of knowledge that have been separated from their original contexts.

For a 2016 exhibition at the Hammer Museum, Porras-Kim selected fragmented objects of unknown origins from the storage shelves of the Fowler Museum at UCLA, whose collections span the arts and cultures of Africa, Asia, the Pacific, and the Indigenous Americas. Her resulting installation, entitled Reconstructions, brought together the artifacts with drawings and sculptures that prompted viewers to consider how the textile fragments, pottery shards, and other orphaned objects functioned and came to be acquired by the museum. Another series of works (completed in 2019) centers on La Mojarra Stela 1, an undeciphered Mesoamerican monument from 156 CE that was discovered in Veracruz, Mexico. In graphite drawings and sculptures, Porras-Kim examines the ways we generate meaning from the as yet untranslated script on the slab. For the project Precipitation for an Arid Landscape (2021–23), Porras-Kim investigated artifacts from the Sacred Cenote at the Maya site of Chichén Itzá, on Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula, that are in the collection of Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. The objects were originally deposited and submerged in the cenote (a natural sinkhole exposing groundwater) as ritual offerings to the Maya rain god Chaac, and they were dredged and taken to the United States in the early twentieth century by an American archaeologist. Porras-Kim’s artistic intervention aims to document and reconnect these fragments with their spiritual function and watery context. For example, she constructed a sculpture out of copal tree resin mixed with dust and residue from the cenote offerings held in museum storage. The work requires that exhibiting institutions bring the piece into contact with local rainwater as a form of care and stewardship. 

More recently, Porras-Kim has expanded her investigations to include materials and processes from the natural world. For one piece in the exhibition A Hand in Nature (2024), she intermingled ancient air with the present-day air in the gallery by releasing molecules trapped in 8,000-year-old glacial ice cores that were deaccessioned from the National Science Foundation. Porras-Kim’s work poses powerful questions about the lives of objects, who shapes their preservation, and how their stories are told.