Korean-Colombian artist Gala Porras-Kim (b. 1984) has been interested in how traces of past civilizations are defined and reinterpreted within contemporary contexts. Her work examines the multilayered narratives of both tangible relics housed in institutional spaces such as museums and galleries and intangible heritage like sound, language, and history.

Gala Porras-Kim’s early work, Whistling and Language Transfiguration (2012), involves a sound piece produced as a vinyl record that translates the tonal Zapotec language, spoken by the Zapotec Indigenous people of Mexico, into whistles. The Zapotec language, used as a strategy of resistance against Spanish colonizers since the 16th century, mimicked words through tonal whistling, disguising conversations as music. 
 
Porras-Kim imitated and recorded the endangered Zapotec language, which has survived solely through oral transmission, using her own whistling and further encoded the sounds as musical notation. Her exploration of a vanishing language questions how we can approach unreadable or inaccessible languages—information that eludes our full understanding.

Created in 2017, Muscle Memory (2017) is a video work that records the silhouette of a dancer attempting Korean traditional dance without access to definitive documentation. Traditional dances, transmitted through bodily practices rather than written records, inherently carry an ontological vulnerability, as they are nearly impossible to preserve and pass down in a perfectly identical state. 
 
The dancer's movements, shaped by their unique physique, anatomical structure, and interpretation of choreography, become a vessel for preserving and containing individualized knowledge through muscle memory. The video, focusing solely on the dancer's silhouette, highlights the body and muscles as vessels that encapsulate the intangible cultural heritage of dance. 
 
These works aim to document intangible cultural legacies handed down through collective history, translating them into the artist's unique visual language and resisting frameworks rooted in Western modernity.

Gala Porras-Kim has also shown a deep interest in artifacts unearthed from ancient sites such as the Mayan civilization, Egypt, and dolmens, which lose their original context when excavated and relocated to museums for display or preservation. Artifacts forcibly displaced under the pretext of research and conservation often find themselves encased in the artificially frozen time of museum glass cases or stripped of their status as artifacts altogether. 
 
The artist examines the complex lives of these objects, which have lost their original functions and places, and questions the institutional practices and policies shaped under the pretext of preserving culture and history. In doing so, Porras-Kim engages in concrete practices by collaborating directly with holding institutions or research centers to explore the regulations and laws surrounding these artifacts. 
 
For instance, her 2019 work, Proposal for the Reconstituting of Ritual Elements for the Sun Pyramid at Teotihuacan, exemplifies a multidisciplinary artistic approach to two massive stones that once stood atop the Sun Pyramid at the archaeological site of Teotihuacan, Mexico.

The two massive stones, presumed to have been used for ritualistic purposes, are now housed in a museum, leaving only two empty pits at the top of the pyramid where they once stood. With permission from the research institute, Porras-Kim created replicas of the stones and submitted a formal proposal to the institute. In her proposal, the artist emphasized the need to revive the ritualistic significance embedded in these structures and suggested placing her replicas at the original locations of the stones atop the pyramid. 
 
Accompanying this project is the monochromatic painting Two Plain Stelas in the Looter Pit at the Top of the Sun Pyramid at Teotihuacan (2019), a black graphite rendering of the dark night sky as seen from within the Sun Pyramid. Through repeated, meticulous pencil strokes, the work poetically evokes the cosmological significance of the Sun Pyramid, a sacred site for the Teotihuacanos who worshipped the sun deity.

Porras-Kim extends her practice beyond reviving the inherent meaning of artifacts to restoring their spiritual life and reawakening their suppressed magical powers and abilities. She creatively reconstructs the contexts surrounding artifacts that modern scientific technologies, grounded in Western epistemology, often dismiss as superstition or primitivism. 
 
For instance, Precipitation for an arid landscape (2021–ongoing) invokes the sacred history of the cenote caves at Chichén Itzá, located in Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula. These mystical natural formations were regarded by the Maya as portals connecting the earthly and underworld realms and as sacred sites where the rain god Chaac resided. 
 
In the early 20th century, artifacts from these cenotes, totaling approximately 30,000 pieces, including relics and human remains, were relocated to Harvard University’s Peabody Museum. Separated from Chaac and removed from their original environment, these artifacts now reside in a dry setting, devoid of the rainwater that once imbued them with spiritual significance.

Porras-Kim sent a letter to the director of the Peabody Museum proposing that fragments detached from the artifacts be reunited with rainwater, replicating their original environment. To realize this idea, she collected dust from the cenote artifacts stored in the museum's archives and combined it with resin extracted from copal trees, a tropical plant native to Central America, to create a new object. 
 
In collaboration with exhibition institutions, Porras-Kim orchestrates a daily ritual where water is sprinkled on the object, symbolically reuniting it with rainwater. Through this ritual, the object serves as a ceremonial intermediary, reconnecting the artifacts, human remains, and the Maya civilization’s rain god, Chaac.

Meanwhile, A terminal escape from the place that binds us (2020–ongoing), presented at the 13th Gwangju Biennale, is a painting project aimed at summoning the spirits of remains displayed in museums. In 2019, Porras-Kim visited Gwangju and reflected on the institutionalized afterlife imposed upon the human remains exhibited in the National Museum of Gwangju, a fate they never chose for themselves. 
 
Through the practice of necromancy, divination with ink stains, Porras-Kim sought to summon these spirits and asked them to reveal their desired final resting places. Using the marbling technique, where paint floats on the surface of water, she engaged with the spirits to manifest images symbolizing the ideal locations where they wish their remains to rest.

In her 2022 work Out of an instance of expiration comes a perennial showing, Porras-Kim collected mold spores from the British Museum's storage facilities and cultivated them on muslin cloth soaked in bacterial growth medium, encased within acrylic display boxes. Over the course of the exhibition, the mold spores began to proliferate, gradually filling the previously blank fabric and transforming into a vibrant, living micro-landscape. 
 
Typically, mold spores are considered indicators of an artifact's preservation status and are classified as part of the collection, remaining confined within storage. By collecting and nurturing these spores, Porras-Kim liberated them from the confines of the repository, allowing them to grow and transform into a new form.

For the “Korea Artist Prize 2023” exhibition at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Korea, Gala Porras-Kim created The weight of a patina of time, which focuses on the dolmens located in Gochang, Jeollabuk-do. The dolmens, which functioned as ritual markers for burial sites during the first millennium BCE, have gradually lost their significance and function over time, only to be rediscovered and designated as a UNESCO World Heritage site in the 2000s.
 
Originally simple natural stones, the dolmens transformed into burial monuments, became makeshift drying racks for laundry and chili peppers, and now are protected as cultural heritage sites. Porras-Kim pays attention to the changing roles of these structures over time, expressing three perspectives on the dolmens through three large-scale drawings.
 
In one drawing, the black graphite layers depict a landscape from the perspective of the deceased buried beneath the dolmen. Another drawing, resembling a photograph, represents the present-day situation where the dolmen is a designated cultural heritage site. The third abstract drawing imagines the view from the moss that has existed at the site for thousands of years, incorporating the perspectives of insects and animals. Displayed side by side, the three drawings present the dolmen's multifaceted reality, encompassing various temporal, spatial, and experiential dimensions.

In 2023, Gala Porras-Kim created 530 National Treasures, a painting that brings together the national treasures of South and North Korea. The treasures are depicted in alternating order from the top left, according to their national treasure numbers. The sparse bottom portion of the painting reflects the fact that North Korea has fewer national treasures compared to South Korea.
 
The origins of these national treasures trace back to a list of treasures designated by Japan in 1933 during the colonial period. Therefore, most of the artifacts in the painting were originally unified as cultural heritage under the name of Joseon before the division of Korea. However, after the liberation and subsequent division of the peninsula, the list was split, and South and North Korea each began managing their own cultural heritage.

By reuniting these divided treasures in her work, the artist highlights how colonialism and the ideology of division have shaped the management and separation of cultural heritage. Moreover, Porras-Kim uses the empty space at the top of the painting to reveal the existence of artifacts that were once designated as national treasures but later de-designated for various reasons. This invites the viewer to reflect on the criteria for designating national treasures and questions what those criteria truly reflect.
 
In this way, Gala Porras-Kim strives to reconcile the ancient desires and traditions embedded in artifacts, which are often stored in vacuum-like conditions in modern museums and storage rooms, with contemporary institutional frameworks. The artist actively engages non-human entities such as objects, human remains, dust, bacteria, and fungi, challenging the anthropocentric attitudes of Western epistemology and colonial projects. Through this approach, her work questions existing practices of preservation and institutions, inviting reflection on the relationship between people and artifacts.

"In fact, my main interest lies in understanding how the original form of historical artifacts, which are meant to serve infinite functions, often comes into conflict with the way they are preserved in their storage environments. I am questioning, 'Why do methodologies intended to help us understand the past sometimes contradict the very purpose of the objects themselves?'
 
I believe that contemporary interventions, such as the storage of artifacts in museums, tell us more about people's motivations and the relationship between people and artifacts than they do about the past itself." (Gala Porras-Kim, Interview for “Korea Artist Prize 2023”)

Gala Porras-Kim lives and works in Los Angeles and London. She has had solo exhibitions at MUAC (Mexico City), Kadist (Paris), Amant Foundation (New York, USA), Gasworks (London), and CAMSTL (St. Louis, USA) and has been included in the Whitney Biennial and Ural Industrial Biennial (2019), and Gwangju Biennial and Sao Paulo Biennales (2021) Jeju Biennial and Liverpool Biennial (2022-2023).
 
She was a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University (2019) and the artist-in-residence at the Getty Research Institute (2020-2022), and she is a Senior Critic at Yale sculpture department.

References

• 갈라 포라스-김, Gala Porras-Kim (Artist Website)
• 올해의 작가상 2023, 만물: 갈라 포라스-김의 작업에 대하여 - 시아오유 웡 (Korea Artist Prize 2023, The Ten Thousand Things: on the Practice of Gala Porras-Kim - Xiaoyu Weng)
• 월간미술, 갈라 포라스-김: 다중적 시선 - 임수영
• 제13회 광주비엔날레, 갈라 포라스-김 - 우리를 구속하는 장소로부터의 영원한 도피 (13th Gwangju Biennale, Gala Porras-Kim - A terminal escape from the place that binds us)
• 국립현대미술관, 올해의 작가상 2023 (National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Korea (MMCA), Korea Artist Prize 2023)
• 리움미술관, 갈라 포라스-김: 국보 (Leeum Museum of Art, Gala Porras-Kim: National Treasures)
• 국립현대미술관, “올해의 작가상 2023” 인터뷰 2편. 갈라 포라스-김, 전소정 작가