Gala Porras-Kim’s practice concerns the complex relationships between cultural artefacts, museums and the institutional conventions that classify and narrativise their place within history. Her project brings together drawings, sculptures and video that reflect her ongoing engagement with frameworks of conservation and the processes by which museum practitioners shape the meaning and function of heritage objects in both destructive and generative ways. The artist’s work invites us to see how conservation treatments that reconstruct or compensate for lost information carry epistemic consequences.
The project’s conceptual anchors include the “ten agents of deterioration” – a framework developed by conservators to categorise major causes of damage. The peculiar agent of “dissociation” describes how objects fall into obscurity within the museum when separated from their given indices and contextual information. Porras-Kim examines, for instance, how new object histories emerge from the conservation techniques of textile reconstruction; or the refashioned items made from textiles that a former employee stole from the V&A Collections. For the artist, a constant negotiation of change runs deep within cultural institutions, despite their efforts to arrest objects in a particular state. As Porras-Kim and the conservator Annika Finne have noted, “the conservation process itself may become a crucible from which new cultural knowledge can be drawn”.
—Gabe Beckhurst Feijoo
