Artist: Gala Porras-Kim
Exhibition title: Out of an instance of expiration comes a perennial showing
Venue: Gasworks, London, UK
Date: January 27 – March 27, 2022
Photography: all images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Gasworks, London
Gasworks presents Out of an instance of expiration comes a perennial showing, the first UK solo exhibition by Los Angeles-based artist Gala Porras-Kim. Her work investigates the institutional frameworks that define, legitimise and preserve cultural heritage, questioning the ethics of museum conservation and inviting the viewer to assign new meaning to artefacts extracted from their original sites and stored in archaeological collections across the world.
Porras-Kim’s new work stems from research she undertook during a residency at Delfina Foundation, London, in 2020. With a focus on the British Museum’s vast collection of funerary art from ancient Egypt and Nubia, the artist examines the institutional afterlife of ceremonial objects and human remains displayed inside vitrines or assembled in storages, thinking through alternative ways of negotiating between the museum’s agenda and the invisible forces governing the eternal rest of their original owners.
The resulting artworks consist of concrete —if often unorthodox— proposals to improve the material and spiritual conditions of artefacts stored in archaeological collections around the world, including those of the Metropolitan in New York, the Museu Nacional in Rio de Janeiro, and the Gwangju National Museum. These are accompanied by letters to their staff in which the artist raises questions about institutional policies regarding the conservation of human remains.
The exhibition features large-scale drawings, sculptures and sound work made in response to specific items found at the British Museum and other encyclopaedic collections. Porras-Kim’s work challenges museums to interrogate their own histories and to become better stewards of the objects they own. Asking whether it’s possible for such objects to continue to perform their original function as spiritual offerings, the exhibition at Gasworks unravels the many worlds colliding in these powerful stones, from institutional frameworks and colonial legacies, to ancient cosmologies and forces greater than us.
In the main gallery, the viewer encounters a replica of a ca. 4,500-year-old granite sarcophagus excavated in Giza, Egypt. Resting on a compass dial, Porras-Kim’s sculpture is an actionable proposal for the realignment of this ancient coffin, currently on display at the British Museum. Eager to give its eternal resident a more dignified afterlife, the artist reminds us that the dead in Egypt were buried facing the rising sun in the east with the head pointing to the north, an aspect overlooked in the current exhibition display.
Presented alongside the sarcophagus are two large works on paper that address historical blind spots occluding our vision. One consists of a pitch-black graphite drawing that portrays the interior of an impenetrable Egyptian tomb, not meant for the living. The second is a paper marbling work that employs ‘encromancy’, an early form of ink divination, to open a conversation with the spirits inhabiting a collection of human bones stored at the Gwangju National Museum. The artist asked them to manifest what would be the preferred location for their remains. Both works could be regarded as landscapes charting unknown territory.
Sitting on a plinth is an enigmatic cube made from the contents of a vacuum cleaner bag from the Metropolitan Museum in New York. Collected during the refurbishment of the Met’s galleries for African, Ancient American and Oceanic art, dust and residues accumulated in the galleries and its display cabinets for over forty years. In the adjacent gallery, a large cloth dampened with agar, a gelatinous support material for growing microorganisms, is culturing mould from the British Museum’s storage.
This work is presented in dialogue with a paper tissue containing a hand imprint made from ashes that refers to ‘Luzia’, the oldest human fossil in Latin America, found among the rubble at the Museu Nacional in Rio de Janeiro after the devastating fire that consumed nearly its entire collections in 2018. The subject line of a letter addressed to the museum’s director reads, ‘Leaving the institution through cremation is easier than as a result of a deaccession policy’.
On the opposite wall, a large drawing recreates a desert landscape familiar to Nenkhefta, an Old Kingdom nobleman whose funerary statue is held at the British Museum. The drawing is designed to envelop the vitrine containing his limestone statue, intended as a vessel for the owner’s spirit. Taking this premise at face value, Porras-Kim’s drawing gives Nenkhefta a view of home, while prompting its caretakers to consider the nuances of the artefacts they are looking after.
Closing the exhibition is a life-size drawing of a stone slab with hieroglyphs carved in sunk relief. It depicts the stela of Hor and Suty at the British Museum, whose inscription contains a hymn celebrating the bond between two brothers—it has been suggested that it could refer to a same-sex couple, although the inscription presents them as twins. From the drawing emanates a soundtrack that breathes new life into this ancient love song, interpreted by Egyptologist Heidi Köpp-Junk using replicas of musical instruments from the era.
Interrogating the methodologies of museum conservation, Porras-Kim’s new body of work explores the way in which encyclopaedic institutions deal with a broad range of living entities in their collections, from spirits and supernatural forces inhabiting the objects on display to fungi and microorganisms in their storages.
Gala Porras-Kim is an artist born in Bogota and based in Los Angeles. Her work has been featured at the São Paulo Biennial; Gwangju Biennale; Whitney Biennial; LACMA, Los Angeles; and Made in LA Biennial, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. She has received awards including Creative Capital, Joan Mitchell Foundation, and Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation. She was a recent Radcliffe fellow at Harvard, and is currently artist-in-residence at The Getty.
Gala Porras-Kim, Out of an instance of expiration comes a perennial showing, 2022. Installation view. Commissioned and produced by Gasworks. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Andy Keate
Gala Porras-Kim, Out of an instance of expiration comes a perennial showing, 2022. Installation view. Commissioned and produced by Gasworks. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Andy Keate
Gala Porras-Kim, Out of an instance of expiration comes a perennial showing, 2022. Installation view. Commissioned and produced by Gasworks. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Andy Keate
Gala Porras-Kim, Out of an instance of expiration comes a perennial showing, 2022. Installation view. Commissioned and produced by Gasworks. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Andy Keate
Gala Porras-Kim, Out of an instance of expiration comes a perennial showing, 2022. Installation view. Commissioned and produced by Gasworks. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Andy Keate
Gala Porras-Kim, Out of an instance of expiration comes a perennial showing, 2022. Installation view. Commissioned and produced by Gasworks. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Andy Keate
Gala Porras-Kim, Out of an instance of expiration comes a perennial showing, 2022. Installation view. Commissioned and produced by Gasworks. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Andy Keate
Gala Porras-Kim, Out of an instance of expiration comes a perennial showing, 2022. Graphite on paper and sound, 207cm x 147cm. Music composed and interpreted by Egyptologist Heidi Köpp-Junk. Commissioned by Gasworks. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Andy Keate
Gala Porras-Kim, Sights beyond the grave, 2022. Graphite and colour pencil on paper and document, 150cm x 277.5cm. Commissioned by Gasworks. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Andy Keate
Gala Porras-Kim, Leaving the institution through cremation is easier than as a result of a deaccession policy, 2021. Ashes, tissue and document, 37.5cm x 37cm. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Andy Keate
Gala Porras-Kim, A terminal escape from the place that binds us, 2021. Ink on paper and document, 185.5cm x 267cm. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Andy Keate
Gala Porras-Kim, The Michael C. Rockefeller Wing at the Met 1982–2021 fragment, 2022. Residue collected from the de-install of the M.C.R. Wing at the Metropolitan Museum, binder, 9.5cm x 9.5cm x 9.5cm. Commissioned by Gasworks. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Andy Keate
Gala Porras-Kim, Out of an instance of expiration comes a perennial showing, 2022. Installation view. Commissioned and produced by Gasworks. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Andy Keate
Gala Porras-Kim, Out of an instance of expiration comes a perennial showing, 2022. Installation view. Commissioned and produced by Gasworks. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Andy Keate
Gala Porras-Kim, Mastaba scene, 2022 Graphite on paper, 269.5cm x 183.5cm. Commissioned by Gasworks. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Andy Keate
Gala Porras-Kim, Mould extraction, 2022. Propagated spores from the British Museum and potato dextrose agar on muslin, 172cm x
300.5cm. Commissioned by Gasworks. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Andy Keate
Gala Porras-Kim, Mould extraction, detail, 2022. Propagated spores from the British Museum and potato dextrose agar on muslin, 172cm x
300.5cm. Commissioned by Gasworks. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Andy Keate
Gala Porras-Kim, Mould extraction, detail, 2022. Propagated spores from the British Museum and potato dextrose agar on muslin, 172cm x
300.5cm. Commissioned by Gasworks. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Andy Keate
Gala Porras-Kim, Mould extraction, 2022. Propagated spores from the British Museum and potato dextrose agar on muslin, 172cm x 300.5cm. Commissioned by Gasworks. Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Andy Keate
