ART CITIES:Los Angeles, Gala Porras-Kim
Gala Porras-Kim’s practice explores how the history of art is built from remnants and fragments of information from the past. More specifically, she explores how our indexes or records are often flawed or willfully misdirected, and how these gaps and lapses in human knowledge have supported colonialist endeavors and global inequality.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: MOCA Archive
Gala Porras-Kim’s work questions how knowledge is acquired and tests the potential of the art object to function as an epistemological tool outside of its traditional historical context. Her recent work examines the ultimate and literal signifier of culture: language, particularly its sounds. Porras-Kim considers the limits of museum practices through the strategies of contemporary art and allows materials to move from their locations in drawers and vaults to a new logic of exhibition and cataloging. Gala Porras-Kim uses the social and political contexts that influence the representation of language and history to make art objects through the learning process. The work comes from a research-based practice that questions how intangible things; sounds, language and history, have been represented through different methodologies such as linguistics and conservation, taking into account the way in which people use the sounds that make up communication with an object. The artist speculates on the possible narratives of the objects, the potential stories of fragments that reintroduce the exhibition to the current modes of representation. Its condition as such is understood and processed as part of a logic in which the artistic gesture of reformulation gives new life to the narrative of objects that would otherwise be lost in history. In the spring of 2019 and as part of the museum’s 40th anniversary celebration, Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) debuted a new series of exhibitions called “Open House”. This series invites Los Angeles-based artists to organize exhibitions drawn from the museum’s extensive collection of more than 7,500 objects. The artists work together with MOCA curators to explore how the museum’s permanent collection can continue to serve, educate, inform, represent, and delight the diverse and extensive community of artists in Southern California. It also gives visitors a chance to see the depth and breadth of MOCA’s collection, focused through the unique lens provided by the community of artists that it serves. “Open House: Gala Porras-Kim” is the second iteration of this exhibition series. For her exhibition, Porras-Kim seeks to explore the ways in which Museums act as stewards of the art it owns. Her exhibition brings together a diverse set of artworks (and other ephemeral materials) to shed light on the role the Museum and its staff of curators, registrars, and conservators play in the life of the works in its permanent collection. To do so, she has sought out artworks that challenge the perception that a museum’s permanent collection is comprised of immutable objects frozen in time. Using artworks that are ephemeral, transitional, malleable, decaying, or even made to expire, Porras-Kim’s exhibition showcases the ways in which museums play an active role in the conservation, display methods, archiving, interpretation, and even the physical form of the works in its permanent collection. The exhibition includes works by artists such as Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Walead Beshty, and Dove Bradshaw.
Info: Curators: Gala Porras-Kim and Bryan Barcena, Assistant Curator: Karlyn Olvido, MOCA Grand Avenue, 250 South Grand Avenue, Los Angeles, Duration: 7/10/19-11/5/20, Days & Hours: Mon, Wed & Fri 11:00-18:00, Thu 11:00-20:00, Sat-Sun 11:00-17:00, www.moca.org
