This article was first published by Ocula.
Colombian-born Los Angeles-based artist Gala Porras-Kim’s work addresses the frameworks of cultural heritage, prompting viewers to become more aware of individual histories and spiritual practices beyond museum label notations.
The artist investigates the evolution of objects throughout time, working with archaeological and ethnographic collections around the world to inquire into the ethics of conservation, cultural heritage, and the plausibility of an all-encompassing ‘encyclopaedic’ knowledge.
These include objects, artefacts, and human remains from renowned institutions like the British Museum, often obtained from non-Western countries during colonial times.
Porras-Kim’s recent exhibition at Gasworks in London, Out of an instance of expiration comes a perennial showing (27 January–27 March 2022), re-imagines artefacts from the British Museum’s funerary art collection from ancient Egypt and Nubia. Porras-Kim spent time in the British Museum during spring 2021 as result of a partnership between Gasworks and the Delfina Foundation, speaking to staff members and curators about alternative ways of conceptualising the institutional afterlives of ceremonial objects and human remains.
Proposing new ways to make sense of the material and spiritual conditions of artefacts stored in archaeological collections worldwide, large-scale drawings, sculptures, and sound work responding to objects in the British Museum’s collection were presented alongside letters to the museum’s staff, questioning policies concerning the conservation of human remains.
Among them, the replica of a 4,500-year-old sarcophagus from Giza has been rotated to face the sunrise east, following ancient Egyptian customs, while the paper marbling work A terminal escape from the place that binds us (2021) employs ink divination to ask spirits inhabiting a set of human bones from the Gwangju Museum collection where they would like to be buried.
The latter work was shown at the 2021 Gwangju Biennale, attesting to Porras-Kim’s site-specific practice, which responds to museum collections where the initial research takes place, from the Gwangju Museum of Art to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
Read the full interview on with Gala Porras-Kim and Gasworks curator Sabel Gavaldon on the Ocula website.
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