Gala Porras-Kim

Porras-Kim’s practice not only addresses museological and epistemological frameworks, but also the legal structures for cultural artifacts. The artist tells us of the object’s moments, its legal lives and how the framework surrounding it has changed. Restitution processes imply a network of displacements that operate beyond mere physical movement and involve the plane of the symbolic and the cultural. Restitution also questions the consequences that arise in the original context from which an object had been extracted, in which it had a specific function in the place it had been deposited, as well as the implications of this loss.

Beyond questions of physical conservation, Porras-Kim is interested in those incorporeal and intangible characteristics that constitute the essence of cultural objects. The artist defends a new politics of care of the artifact that doesn't prioritize its material conservation, as it is inevitably destined to deteriorate given the impossibility of stopping the passage of time. It’s not simply a question of the transmutation of matter: Where does the object reside? Who decides what gets conserved?