How Gala Porras-Kim honors the forgotten afterlives of ancient objects in museums

Gala Porras-Kim's “A Terminal Escape from the Place that Binds Us" (2022) / Courtesy of MMCA

By Park Han-sol

It was during her trip to Gwangju in Korea in early 2020 when artist Gala Porras-Kim came across a peculiar “object” in the collection of the city’s national museum – the human remains from a 1st-century BCE shipwreck.

The bodies, originally found inside a millennia-old pot on the sunken vessel, were now housed in the museum’s storage, “organized by size and dimension of each of the parts – femur, arm, head – instead of as a whole,” as she recalled in a recent interview with The Korea Times.

Her eyes turned to the existence of these once-living individuals within the aseptic environment of today’s cultural institution. What does it mean for these bodies to be removed from their final resting place and turned into preserved relics for archaeological study, with no regard for the afterlife they might have desired?

“Yes, the remains are an antiquity, but they never stop being a person,” she said.

She wrote a letter to the director of the Gwangju National Museum, proposing that “we, as living people, will have to negotiate between our desires to think of them as historical objects, and the respect for the individual person.”

Artist Gala Porras-Kim / Courtesy of MMCA

And as an artist, she decided to produce a work that could somehow visually reflect the spirits’ preferred resting place outside of the museum’s storage. For this to happen, the image could not be completed by her hands alone; it had to be a collective creation involving elements beyond her control.

She borrowed the practice of “encromancy,” an ancient form of divination by ink stains, so that the swirling patterns of yellow green and aquamarine on paper were dictated by invisible forces – as if the spirits were “arranging” the pigment to reveal their wishes.

The resulting panel of marbled paper summons an abstract geographical landscape that could, in theory, indicate the ideal setting for their remains. While its exact location remains illegible to our eyes, this gesture could be “a first step to acknowledge the agency” of the deceased, she noted.

The series, titled “A Terminal Escape from the Place that Binds Us,” is part of Porras-Kim’s ongoing interest in investigating the fraught relationship between historical objects – including human remains – and present-day museums’ conservation doctrines, as well as their cataloging, indexing and display practices.

When ancient objects enter such a highly controlled, often bureaucratic, environment, can they still perform their originally intended function?

“Essentially, every museum is subject to these questions. There’s a conflict between the current way these institutions maintain history and the artifacts’ original function, like, what an ancient person would have wanted for that object.”

Installation view of Gala Porras-Kim's show, presented as part of the group exhibition, "Korea Artist Prize 2023," at the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (MMCA) in central Seoul / Courtesy of MMCA

Her interest lies in proposing different compromises that cultural institutions can make with the past to be able to accommodate both the relics’ intangible, spiritual function and their contemporary life inside the storage or in display cases. And to achieve this, she often collaborates with the museums themselves.

One of her projects, “Sunrise for 5th-Dynasty Sarcophagus from Giza at the British Museum,” involved creating a full-size replica of the stone coffin, with an arrow marked out on the ground to propose that the tomb be rearranged eastward. Ancient Egyptians had the dead face east to the rising sun, and the artist reminds the museum of the way it can better honor the past in its display simply by shifting the angle of the relic.

At Harvard University’s Peabody Museum, Porras-Kim encountered thousands of objects extracted from the Chichén Itzá cenote, a sacred sinkhole cave used by the Mayans as a place of worship. Originally placed in the cave as offerings to the Mayan god of rain, Chaac, these items were now being housed in the moisture-free, temperature-controlled environment.

In “Precipitation for an Arid Landscape,” she combined copal, prominently found in cenotes, with dust extracted from the museum's storage, where the Mayan objects are stored, to create a block that can be doused with rainwater, thus reuniting the artifacts with Chaac’s power.

This year, the Korean-Colombian artist has been named one of the four finalists for the Korea Artist Prize, a major contemporary art award co-organized by the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea (MMCA) and SBS Foundation.

In her latest triptych, “The Weight of a Patina of Time,” on view at the national museum’s group exhibition, “Korea Artist Prize 2023,” in central Seoul, Porras-Kim’s archaeological reimagining extends to the numerous dolmens found in Gochang, North Jeolla Province.

Each of its three panels represents different perspectives of the megalithic tomb – one from the viewpoint of the person buried when dolmens still served as grave markers, another from the present-day point of view where the stones hold UNESCO historical site status, and the third from a natural standpoint, indicated by the moss covering the monolith’s surface.

Like other projects, the work is a reminder of how an antiquity that was supposed to spiritually function forever is leading a current life in conflict with its original intent.

Installation view of Gala Porras-Kim's solo exhibition, "National Treasures," at the Leeum Museum of Art in central Seoul / Courtesy of Leeum Museum of Art

Concurrently taking place in another corner of central Seoul, at the Leeum Museum of Art, is Porras-Kim’s solo show, “National Treasures,” where her new works engage in a compelling dialogue with 10 national treasures drawn from the museum’s collection.

In her photorealistic drawing, “530 National Treasures,” the artist summons state-designated treasures from both North and South Korea, arranged in the order of their registration numbers. Her other piece, “37 Korean Objects Uprooted During the Japanese Occupation,” brings together relics presumed to have been extracted from Korea during the 1910-45 Japanese colonial rule.

These works do far more than simply reuniting objects that can no longer be physically present in one place. By laying bare the modern systems of cultural heritage classification, they reveal how the state evaluates and categorizes centuries-old artifacts whose perceived functions have changed in the contexts of colonization and national division.

“All of the depicted historical objects were made before the nation (Korea) split. What does it mean to have national treasures and decide these different categorizations for them when the (idea of) nation is always moving around? And who decides what becomes a treasure?” she said.

Gala Porras-Kim's "37 Korean Objects Uprooted During the Japanese Occupation" (2023) / Courtesy of the artist, Commonwealth and Council

Although her works can be viewed in line with the current push to repatriate the museums’ looted cultural heritage around the world, Porras-Kim noted that her artistic mission to honor the ancient objects’ intangible, sacred functions in today’s institutions is much broader than that.

“Restitution is prioritizing geography. It’s like physically moving the relics from one place to another. But I think when the objects were brought to the institution, it brought its context as well. So museum conservators can be regarded as their contemporary caretakers,” she added.

“I’m trying to deal with how the ancient past can be better represented in these establishments.”

Porras-Kim’s pieces can be viewed at the MMCA’s “Korea Artist Prize 2023” and the Leeum Museum of Art’s “National Treasures” until March 31 next year.