Gala Porras-Kim

kurimanzutto presents the first exhibition of Gala Porras-Kim (Bogotá, 1984) at the gallery in Mexico City. The opening will feature the conversation as part of Future Dialogues, led by Gala Porras-Kim and José Esparza Chong Cuy. It will take place on April 11 at 1:30 pm.

For this project, the artist brings together several bodies of work through which she questions the complex relationship between museums and conservation institutions, the objects they house, and the contexts from which they were extracted. Through processes of reconstruction and relocation, the exhibition considers how institutional frameworks reclassify and redefine these objects, and how their original spatial, material, and temporal conditions might be restored.

For the exhibition Espacios del futuro replican los del pasado, Porras-Kim presents the installation The motion of an alluvial record (2024), originally created for Storefront for Art & Architecture in New York. The project recreates the atmospheric conditions of the mangroves of the Yucatán Peninsula, placing the works in an environment that mirrors the one from which their materials come, in contrast to the static, controlled climates that museums implement for conservation. Inside this greenhouse, visitors encounter the high humidity and temperature characteristic of these wetlands. A work composed of clay, mud, and sediments from the region contains particles of both ancient and contemporary structures transported by water. Because these particles remain in motion, they do not settle into a linear geological stratification associated with compacted sediment and a progressive notion of time; instead, they produce a fluctuating record linked to the Maya concept of cyclical time. Porras-Kim inverts the recommended conditions and proposes that these objects should be conserved within environments that resemble their places of origin, offering a different approach from that of museums' controlled spaces.

Along the walls, outside the atmospheric pavilion, color drawings are presented that replicate the decorations of the murals from the Techinantitla complex, in Teotihuacan. These murals were chiseled out and fragmented to be sold on the black market, appearing in private collections and museums in the United States, Mexico, and Europe in the 1960s, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Ethnological Museum in Berlin, among others. Originally created as integral components of architectural surfaces, these images have been recatalogued as discrete works. Their display at conventional heights displaces their original orientation near the floor. In the series Uprooted (2026), Porras-Kim portrays these fragments and presents them unified near the floor, according to their original positions, so that the gallery space replicates aspects of the architectural conditions from which they were extracted.

Another group of works focuses on the production of the artist Brígido Lara (b. 1940), who in the 1960s and 70s made "original interpretations" of clay ritual objects from the Totonac culture of Veracruz. Lara claims that his works entered museum collections—often through the same private collectors who bought Teotihuacan murals—and today can be seen in institutions such as the MET, LACMA, the Saint Louis Art Museum, and the Dallas Museum of Art, among others, as ancient objects without attribution, being indistinguishable from original artifacts. For years they were exhibited as pre-Hispanic pieces until Lara revealed his authorship. Porras-Kim presents a series of graphite drawings of these sculptures on graphite backgrounds that function as reflective surfaces, where the objects appear accompanied by a slight echo of themselves. This subtle mirror effect suggests a duality that links the object with a past image of itself, making visible how Lara's works occupy the place of antiquity in the present, collapsing temporal distance.

Finally, Porras-Kim presents two large-scale drawings of Maya stelae depicting the rulers of El Perú-Waka': Lady K'abel (Stela 34) and K'inich B'ahlam II (Stela 33). Originally placed facing each other in an architectural complex in Guatemala, these monuments were extracted and separated, now belonging to the Cleveland Museum of Art in Ohio and the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas. The drawings present them facing each other once again, reconstructing in the gallery the spatial relationship they once held. These pieces bring to light the complexity of the legal frameworks and interests that come into play regarding restitution claims, questioning the role of institutions in legitimizing these objects and the cultures from which they come.

Through these recreations, Porras-Kim traces how the movement of objects within institutions introduces a dissociative layer that recategorizes them. By omitting conventional systems of climate control and display—keeping materials damp or restoring original spatial relationships—the gallery becomes a site where the conditions of the past are reconstructed.

—kurimanzutto