Gala Porras-Kim. The Motion of an Alluvial Record
Artista: Gala Porras-Kim
Curator: Natalia Valencia Arango
Gala Porras-Kim’s first solo institutional exhibition in Colombia gathers eight works produced between 2016 and 2026, all concerned with the ways in which museums, collections, and power structures mold the narratives contained in cultural artifacts. Porras-Kim approaches these concerns using various languages, including drawing, installation, archives, and institutional protocols in several world locations. Her work generates material and discursive speculations about the other possible lives of objects classified by the Western museographical tradition as archaeological and ethnographic. Western understandings of these objects often disregard their roles in ritual and spiritual life, and their original function within cosmological systems that operate beyond their material existence.
The exhibition takes its title from the central atmospheric installation, which splits the gallery space in two and where Porras-Kim considers the cyclical conception of time in the Mayan worldview and its inscription in the wetlands of Yucatan in Mexico. Other works of the exhibition focus on the ritual function of water and rain in the spiritual life of artifacts, as part of research conducted by the artist also in Yucatan, at the sacred site of Chichen Itzá. The three remaining works converse with the notion of humidity: the artist works directly with the MAMM museum’s water collection system, engages with the organic aspects of the British Museum’s storage facilities in London, and investigates the technique of efflorescence, used as a method of architectural demolition in nineteenth-century Mexico.
Porras-Kim’s interest in conservation and institutional historiography revolves around the epistemologies that intersect in the idea of the contemporary Western museum. Her works foreground the contentious aspects of these encounters when such institutions attempt to represent, conserve, and hold objects from non-Western cultures. The artist analyzes specific conservation techniques (temperature and plague control, disinfection, and general aseptic methods) and exposes their operational logics: they represent a constant struggle against the passage of time, material decay, and the natural organic processes undergone by objects.
This exhibition articulates a critical view of the institutional logics that have determined the conservation and interpretation of cultural belongings, and the construction of museographical narratives. The project reflexively engages with the local context: in Colombia, State budgets devoted to culture and heritage conservation have been historically vulnerable to fluctuations as a result of the country’s internal armed conflict and the complexity of other political junctures.
The work The Motion of an Alluvial Record was developed for and commissioned by Storefront for Art & Architecture in New York, where it was shown in 2024.
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