In our increasingly fast-paced digital age, it’s rare to see young artists engaging with ancient history – where once art students would spend hours painstakingly learning traditional techniques and studying the art historical canon, these days many art schools actively encourage their students to think outside the box, to experiment with bold concepts and embrace emerging technologies in a quest for the new. But not Gala Porras-Kim, the Colombian-born, LA-based artist who’s quite literally taking an old-school approach to things, and whose work is currently on display at New York’s Tina Kim Gallery.
Porras-Kim’s work traces the line between art and artefact, between anthropology and art. “My sister’s an anthropologist,” she tells SLEEK. “And I’ve always been interested in how undocumented objects get documented, and then legitimised.” It’s the motivation behind Porras-Kim’s quirky eBay-sourced artifactual works, comprised of pieces that she bids on, and then recontextualises. “In the US you can buy artefacts,” she stresses, “which is insane to me!” She points to one such object, a ceramic fragment, apparently from the South West, mounted on a graphite “blob” (her word, not mine) purely because “there’s no bigger likelihood that the original was not this shape.”
It’s this quirky re-envisionment of the anthropological that allows Porras-Kim to frontline the often ridiculous (and defunct) nature of the ethnographic approach, where the question of legitimacy and documentation are inextricably tied. “The project has a lot of documents,” Porras-Kim explains. “It has the eBay receipt where it says like ‘two grandmas collected it in the South West’. And then there’s this certificate of authenticity — but it’s the sketchiest looking certificate. I’m interested in why that feels sketchy, when we don’t actually know. And why the conservator form from the Fowler museum at UCLA looks super-legit. What documentation will make a historical fragment seem more legit than not?”
As Porras-Kim is quick to point out, this process of legitimisation is often a Western construct, or a way that non-Western artefacts find meaning through validation by the West. It’s the message behind her language-based works – and the most intriguing of those on show at Tina Kim – which centre on the Mexican Zapotec language. As a purely tonal language, Zapotec exists only in speech, and is often communicated through varied whistling sounds. However, it’s currently being translated into a written dictionary in a project funded by the US government. “It’s so backwards!” Porras-Kim exclaims. “It fundamentally does not translate into writing.” It’s an arguably pointless exercise. “If you want to keep this language alive, don’t write a dictionary — get all the grandmothers in the town and teach them how to teach it,” Porras-Kim suggests. “So many of the people that speak it are illiterate, so they wouldn’t even be able to tell you if it was right when written down!”
But what may be a useless endeavour for the Zapotec-speaking community has been a critical point of entry for Porras-Kim. Though her original intentions for learning Zapotec were less visionary — “I just wanted to know if my UCLA co-workers were talking shit,” she laughs — her learning process has manifested in works which confront the so-called crisis of anthropology. “It’s about what happens when the form doesn’t match,” she explains. “How can you take this abstract idea and make it into something solid within your own rigid context?” It’s something that Porras-Kim is good at, and which characterises her work. From her reconstructed grass basket to the aforementioned ceramic shard rehoused in a blob, Porras-Kim moulds her own speculative histories for fragments from a forgotten past.
Gala Porras-Kim’s work is on display at Tina Kim Gallery, New York until 3 August. The group show also features work by E.J. Hill, Carolina Caycedo, Beatriz Cortez, Rafa Esparza and Patricia Fernández.