Gala Porras-Kim

In her research at the Museo delle Civiltà – developed in collaboration with the MAO-Museo Arte Orientale in Turin – Gala Porras-Kim (1984 Bogotá, Colombia. She lives and works in Los Angeles, USA) focused on the collections of the former National Museum of Oriental Art and on the relationship that archaeologists, art historians and conservators have established with the objects in their care. She developed an audio-video installation evoking not only the stratification of archiving and cataloguing, but also of the stories and interpretations that the objects themselves have triggered, starting from the moment of their musealisation. In Porras-Kim’s talk in the methodological Entrance of the Palazzo delle Scienze, however, the artist presented three excerpts from previous works that problematise the presence of human remains in international museums. These were developed in dialogue with institutions such as the National Museum of Brazil in Rio de Janeiro, the Gwanhju National Museum in South Korea and the Peabody-Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University in the USA.

Porras-Kim reflected on the narratives connected to the possession of an object by the institution of the museum and the original spiritual and ritual value of that same object, thus delving into how the material identity of museumised objects is systematically and inevitably altered by being displayed and mediated within the museum itself. In this process, in museums, an object would eventually become like “dust particles held together through the method of preservation.” This approach also applies to ethnographic objects, which, in their contexts of origin, were conceived and shared as subjects, actively embodying a plurality of symbolic and communitarian values. Their role as active components of a culture should not end once they are musealised within a showcase or displayed in a museum. With reference to the 1970 UNESCO convention protecting the right to cultural property, Porras-Kim also includes in her interventions information about the ‘anonymous looters’ who decontextualised these objects and the ‘missing persons’ from official museum accounts. By recognising a creative personality in the environmental contexts of discovery, the artist succeeds in giving a critically and narratively reactive role to the objects themselves in museums. Works by Porras-Kim have been exhibited at the São Paulo Biennial; the Gwangju Biennial; the Whitney Biennial, New York; the LACMA, Los Angeles; the Made in LA Biennial, Los Angeles; and the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. Among the awards received: Creative Capital and awards recognised by the Joan Mitchell Foundation and the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation.