Gala Porras-Kim

Episode 2Gala Porras-Kim
Series

Rituals and Creativity

In the rhythm of daily acts, creativity quietly takes shape. Artists show how repeated gestures, routines, and careful attention transform ordinary moments into meaningful practice. Through these rituals—whether in drawing, movement, or material exploration—art becomes a meditation, revealing how consistency, focus, and care shape both creative work and the evolving self.

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Episode 2 of 4

Gala Porras-Kim

Gala Porras‑Kim is a multidisciplinary, research‑driven artist whose practice examines how museum and institutional frameworks classify, preserve, and display cultural and historical objects. Through drawings, sculptures, installations, and sometimes organic or environmental processes, she challenges conventional museology by bringing fragments, uncertain provenance, and archive materials into renewed visibility.

Her work engages with ethnographic and archaeological collections — often neglected or decontextualized — and proposes speculative reinterpretations that reveal how value and meaning are historically and institutionally constructed. In doing so, she encourages reflection on memory, heritage, authorship, and the power embedded in systems of classification and care. In the context of The Self as a Practice: Rituals and Creativity, her attention to repetitive processes, material care, and slow research frames art-making as a ritualistic act — a meditative practice through which knowledge, identity, and meaning are continuously produced.

Episode

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Gala Porras-Kim

Gala Porras-Kim’s drawings “index” not only objects but also museological practices, in particular the interpretation and taxonomization of historical artifacts. The drawings group together historical objects based on their formal qualities. The artifacts, of diverse histories and provenance, share common themes such as dogs, acrobats, and magical instruments.

Porras-Kim’s subjective groupings underscore the arbitrariness inherent in collating and displaying these works in museum collections, divorced from their original temporal, geographic, and semiotic contexts, which often remain unknown to the present-day viewer.

 

 

- Commonwealth and Council

Installation view

Liverpool Biennial: uMOYA, The Sacred Return of Lost Things, 2023, Tate Liverpool, Victoria Gallery & Museum, World Museum

Installation view

Korea Artist Prize, 2023, National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea

Featured Artist

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Gala Porras-Kim
Artist
Gala Porras-Kim
B.1984, Colombian

Gala Porras-Kim's practice interrogates the processes and ethics of museum conservation and, more broadly, the collections and institutions within which contested artefacts are housed and preserved. Porras-Kim is interested in the politics and policies museums adopt in the contemporary moment and how they negotiate with problematic pasts. The artist often uses letters as exhibition captions – sometimes written to institutions propositions for approaches to improve the conditions of their artefacts – creating an epistolary narrative to guide visitors through the space and her works. She also uncovers and proposes innovative tactics through which artefacts can be liberated and escape from museum vitrines, archives and storage facilities; exiting through cremation, being eaten by mould and running within the stomach of spores, and fleeing as particles or fragments, detritus collected following an exhibition deinstall. The outcomes of Porras-Kim’s research, made in response to museum collections, are realised in a range of media, from sculptures and sound works to large-scale drawings. ...

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Assoukrou Aké
Series: Rituals and CreativityEpisode 3
Assoukrou Aké

Assoukrou Aké is a multidisciplinary artist exploring how personal memory meets shared pasts. Through sculpture and engraving, he revisits fragments to create space for reflection.

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