The University Museum of Contemporary Art MUAC in Mexico City recently presented Between lapses of histories, an exhibition on the works of LA-based artist Gala Porras-Kim. Due to my long-standing interest in heritage, its extraction and the creation of narratives that justify such practices to feed museum collections, I invited Malkia Okech to join me in conversation, to unpack different aspects of the exhibition from the perspectives of art, curating, politics, and heritage.

Malkia Okech is a Philadelphia-based researcher, artist, and community archaeologist. They are interested in the cross sections of multimodal archaeology, art, technology, cultural heritage, anticapitalism, and liberation. Their goal is to contribute to a pedagogy of interdisciplinary Memory Work by and for the people. Their praxis is formed by the past, present, and future continuum of freedom dreaming, rooted in international solidarity.

Between lapses of histories, installation view at MUAC. Photo: David Ayala-Alfonso

David Ayala-Alfonso: I had great expectations about visiting Gala Porras Kim’s exhibition, Between lapses of histories at MUAC. Porras-Kim has been on my radar for some time, as much of my current work revolves around ideas of heritage, extraction, the trajectories of material culture, and the creation of collections and their origin myths. I believe these are also among your current research interests?

Malkia Okech: Before I get into the meat here, I am a cultural heritage practitioner and artist. I identify as a Memory Worker – or a participant in the life cycle of heritage production as it relates to quite simply how we remember, why, and through what. I use this lens when I approach my own artwork, which I could describe as speculative archaeology and futurism using digital technology, found objects, and research (archival, archaeological, theoretical). Memory Work as a movement, identity, and approach to history/heritage is particularly arising in the United States as a point of dialogue with Black artists, librarians, and archivists especially. In a way it breathes new life into how communities, specialists, and everyone in between can find a common ground or way to reclaim heritage practices and the ‘museum’.

The exhibit text claims “Her work reflects on the way in which objects are inserted into museums and heritage institutions and subjected to cataloging and conservation systems.” I would argue it is a rather literal reflection, in some ways it is just a replication for the gallery audience, as opposed to the museum one. And by audience, a very particular and niche foray of interdisciplinary exploration that is less in conversation with a general population’s relationship to their heritage.

“The artist defends a new politics of care of the artifact that doesn’t prioritize its material conservation” I think a claim such as this, such as enacting care, requires a certain kind of holistic approach to the life of an artifact AND the communities they interact with. I think it is very interesting to consider the life of an object as it relates to itself and its before-and-after-lives and its very making. However, I think when we want to bring the political into it, restitution, and other frameworks of agency and ownership, that is when we have to remember artifacts don’t act on their own, and their immobilized status behind a glass in the traditional museum does not mean that is where we should limit the critique. The use of letters to institutions starts to touch on this, however I saw it as merely posturing.

DA: I agree that the definitions of care are always part of a broader political framework, not explicit in the way we usually frame this notion. In the case of the heritage artifacts in archaeological or encyclopedic museums, I think a primary concern is that they are in the middle of a major controversy regarding the trajectories they followed to become part of a collection. There is a certain appearance of denouncement that comes from the syntax chosen by Porras-Kim for her work: it begins with the letters you mention, directed to major institutions, where she requests some form of reparation which, as you suggest, seems to live merely in a rhetorical realm. But then the gesture becomes rather ambiguous, as the process started by the artist at each museum is followed by the creation of a painting or installation. The works themselves operate fully inside late modernist artistic canon, something that is not an uncommon sight at contemporary art museums. What is surprising is that, having the opportunity to envision other lives for the artifact, the artist chooses to reproduce the prevailing institutional and disciplinary ethos, both of art and of anthropology. 

For example, the work 615 Offerings for the Rain at the Peabody Museum imagines the reunion of looted pieces, but inside a museum shelf. This speaks to your point about posturing, a parafictional gesture that primes the viewer for a certain experience that is ultimately never delivered. It seems that the work shows itself as political, but at the same time, lives comfortably behind the glass; in other words, the political is casted and then neutralized by the same artistic gesture.

You mention the artifact linked to the communities they interact with, and I think there is a lot of conversation about how collection narratives tend to obscure history by creating this false separation between the object, the community that created it, and the purposes it served. Perhaps it is a rationale inherited by general modernist discourses that both justify and obscure influence?

615 Offerings for the Rain at the Peabody Museum, installation view at MUAC. Photo: David Ayala-Alfonso

MO: I’m glad you brought up 615 Offerings for the Rain at the Peabody Museum. These pieces in particular evoked a particular reaction from me. I think this also relates to your finishing note about the deactivation of objects. My technical training is in archaeology, and part of that included archaeological illustration. I worked on a couple different archaeological projects in which I had to draw artifacts. To me, seeing this nearly identical practice reframed as artworks completely obfuscates any narrative of the “journey of the artifacts”, in this case from the Cenote Sagrado of Chichen Itza. If anything, the objects are again halted in their tracks and objectified for an audience, albeit a wider one than maybe a manual, publication, or research report. I did some digging, and I’d love to get my hands on Edward H Thompson’s Memoirs of the Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University. Vol. I.-No. 2 Cave of Loltun, Yucatan. Report of Explorations by the Museum, 1888-89 and 1890-91. 

This seems to be in contrast to Precipitation for an Arid Landscape, wherein gallery staff harvest rainwater and add it to the object, and Forecasting Signal which similarly shows an effect of water on a material. 615 Offerings being in view of these perhaps creates an in-gallery ecosystem to Porras-Kim’s point. 

Here, both Porras-Kim and museum workers become practitioners of a particular spiritual practice, in this case of a Mesoamerican ritual. I emphasize museum workers here especially, because they are employed to be a part of the piece, the ritual, while also sinking into the background as props for a performance. In this way Porras-Kim peoples and de-peoples a material culture at the same time, but in a way where I am not totally convinced this is working towards restitution. Actually maybe she isn’t, and maybe I projected this based on her selected subjects as cases with very loaded examples of looting, institutional erasure, and appropriation.

As I sort these things out in my mind, it dawns on me that perhaps these are the intended observations. Ultimately, I don’t even think there is a call to action. That is where I particularly struggle to get my head around the goal of the work: its aestheticization of what I consider very potent issues of our time, in hand with other capitalist carnage. I stumbled upon this quote:

“You can’t escape history,” Porras-Kim says. “We have to think instead about how the objects inside a collection can change the building around it. Like the mummies, for example, their presence turns the British Museum into a literal tomb. Let’s treat it as that. It’s still a museum, but that is its secondary function. Everybody is trying to decolonise the museum, but okay, then you’ll have to remove the whole thing. How do you have a decolonised museum when the building, the city, the country, itself comes from that history? History is additive, so this building could have been colonial made, but you can change it and add to that. Things can be multiple.”

https://artreview.com/gala-porras-kim-wellbeing-of-artefacts/

I am going to leave this here, because the more I think about the quote and its implications, I fall deeper into a mental rabbit hole. So before I dive in, I am curious about your thoughts.

Precipitation for an arid landscape, installation view at Amant Foundation. Photo: Shark Senesac. Courtesy of Amant, Brooklyn.

DA: This is all a thoughtful analysis, and I think you hit an important spot here: there’s a difference between what the works are actually doing, the artist’s intentions, and the political implications of the exhibition. When you analyze 615 Offerings and Precipitations for an Arid Landscape, there is an implicit desire for action and restitution in the works and exhibitions that are focused on processes of looting, the origin of collections, and the politics of institutions on acquiring cultural heritage. By reading the quotation you bring into attention, and watching Porras-Kim’s remarks on the on the exhibition (available on the museum’s website), it is clear that the work lives exactly where the artist wants it to be: a sort of evocation that creates the opportunity for a series of aesthetic and conceptual operations, well rooted into artistic and museum canons: cultivating mold, shaping dust, capturing humidity, creating compositions by scrambling information, or adding elements together, etc. While it is important that the artist contributes to the dissemination of the complicated histories behind museum collections, there seems to be a certain complacency with the current state of things.

And still, she hits the spot, in a way: “remov[ing] the whole thing” might be precisely what is required. As Shimrit Lee points out in her recent book, Decolonize Museums, restitution processes are quite long and complicated, but this is precisely why there needs to be a sustained and collective effort of challenging the status quo, by multiple means, including (and perhaps especially through) artistic practice. To have a platform and not using the opportunity to challenge, feels to some extent, like a missed opportunity. And it feels more so when you think about all the access that was gained, and all the dialogues that were started with institutions, in order to produce these bodies of work. But come to think about it, it may be precisely because there’s not a call to action that the access is gained or maintained? I ask myself these questions since, like Porras-Kim, I often think about the contemporary role of museums that own and present historical collections. But I differ in the sense that I do believe a re-foundation of institutions is not only possible, but also urgent. Many museum institutions were, in fact, created on colonial ideologies, policies and operations, and survive today by shifting the museum narrative from a sort of necropolitics of bodies and matter (looting, acquiring war trophies, or destroying worlds and cultures in the name of their very study) to this cleansed idea of being caretakers of a fragmented heritage (fragmenting as a heritage operation itself), all in the name of humanity, that last word being a term of debate and of rigged usage. 

I also think the debate can easily fall onto self-justifying modernist tropes, such as: “the artist/the art do not need to change anything (in the world)”. But is this not a moment of transformation, where the widespread destruction of cultures, the radicalization of politics, and the environmental disasters globally, call for a different approach to art, heritage, and material culture in general?

MO: To your note on modernism and the role of artists in changing the current conditions, I wanted to look at one line from the quote I pulled from Porras-Kim: “History is additive, so this building could have been colonial made, but you can change it and add to that. Things can be multiple.” I was just struck by this idea of additivism so I went back to a document I like called the Additivist Manifesto, by Morehshin Allahyari & Daniel Rourke. I know you’ve worked with Allahyari before so it’s a nice full-circle moment, and begs the question of Allahyari’s approach to heritage versus Porras-Kim’s –a topic I know you’ve covered a bit in other writing of yours. Particularly focusing on additivism though, I feel like Porras-Kim cites it in a rather reductionist fashion. The multitudinous nature of something does not necessarily justify its existence, and that’s why I like the additivist manifesto. It is a call for this reckoning in our understanding of our relationship to matter, matter that rapidly changes with the hyperevolution and devolution of the earth and the things that go along with that, with a focus on 3D printing.  “Additivism can emancipate us. Additivism will eradicate us.” I have a deep appreciation for Allahyari’s hybrid past future approach to cultural heritage, which sets apart from Porras-Kim’s deeply in-the-now methodology that I think falls short of what it could be capable of. Material Speculation: ISIS is featured in the full text, and the piece emphasizes a life and sharing beyond one place, but the world wide web. Whereas Porras-Kim’s ritual reinventions require a particular setting and access, that could be written as an additive form of preservation but as we have discussed it is limited by its place. 

All of these examples feed back into the discussion of restitution and repatriation as you mention. To your point about Lee’s Decolonize Museums, one text I’d recommend to follow up with is Chip Colwell’s Plundered Skulls and Stolen Spirits. It’s a few years old but provides much more rigorous examples of repatriation in theory and practice with regard to NAGPRA and Indigenous artifacts in the US. 

While I was sorting through things to see if I had more on Chip’s work, I ran into this article: “Seeing hybridity in the anthropology museum: Practices of longing and fetishization” (Diana DiPaolo Loren 2015). What a perfect coincidence that the text addresses collections at the Peabody. I think it’s a really good article and I want to spend some more time with it as it relates to this, and maybe even go down the fetishization route for a little bit. What strikes me in relation to Porras-Kim is from the conclusion: 

The tendency to fetishize objects of hybridity emerges from practices of longing as hybrid objects serve as traces of the authentic experience—in this case, colonial hybridity—that we seek to narrate. ‘‘We equate the object to the experience and they become what we need them to be’’ (Poliquin, 2012: 203). In this way, hybrid objects are a lodestone for those seeking to define a certain story of past hybridity, often to the detriment of other colonial objects and assemblages that also emerge from decidedly plural and complex colonial engagements but which are ‘‘drowned out by the silence of the ordinary’’ (Stewart, 1993: 14). As noted by Benjamin (1969) and others, these enchantments with certain objects and certain collections often reveal more about our own interpretative histories and proclivities. Our academic identities are shaped and reshaped by colonial objects. They are part of our lived experience of colonialism in the modern world, and are used to create our own postcolonial narratives.

Di-Paolo Loren

Imagine we see the works Porras-Kim made as hybrids of some kind of equation like so: 

(original context + contemporary intervention) * institutional placemaking = a fetishization? 

Between lapses of histories, installation view at MUAC. Photo: David Ayala-Alfonso

DA: This is a small constellation of arguments, and some ideas deserve special attention. To speak to your point of additivism, it strikes me as rather shocking that the conversation about the ideas on the posthuman is nurtured in such a way that it contributes to this new colonizing procedure of crafting a flattened notion of humanity. Contemporary Western thought seems to use it to push forward the idea that we came to a point of depletion or exhaustion in terms of our creative capacity, so the natural impulse is to favor the posthuman (such as a second-wave AI in Allahyari and Rourke’s manifesto) before even considering indigenous, non western and other forms of thought as viable alternatives to the intellectual and philosophical canon that drove us to the current crisis. And I don’t mean this merely in terms of advocating for representation, but in fact, observing that some of these knowledge traditions have already achieved sustainability from their inception. The lack of inclusion of these perspectives privileges the emergence of commonplace forms of critique of colonialism that fail to address key aspects of this monumental issue (such as the economic trajectories of the Western extractive model, or how what we call actants in contemporary Western philosophical tradition have different roles and agencies in other knowledge traditions).

This is probably why we can’t go beyond the fetish for cultural artifacts (to speak to your second point) that characterizes the museum collection model, and late capitalism in general. It is precisely, as Di Paolo Loren mentions, because we create these stories around the object that we stop seeing the life of the object and we replace it with the life of our relationship with it. This narrowing operation allows for the practices of looting, and subsequently, of the creation of museum narratives that justify the possession of cultural heritage of other cultures. In the case of Porras-Kim, it is very interesting to witness how this process takes place through artistic operations. It begins with drawing, but then it goes to recreate a series of other operations (which I mentioned before) that belong to the tradition of institutional critique. In the early days of institutional critique, these gestures generated reactions from the institutions, and sometimes even censorship. However, nowadays they are welcomed with a kind of fascination that reminds us that their political agency has faded and that capital has metabolized them as part of the collection of party tricks that the art market loves and champions.

This leads me to a question I would like to pose, to put Between Lapses of Histories in dialogue with the broader context of heritage, restitution, and the role of contemporary art in this discussion. What do you think the show actually does and what do you feel it is missing?

MO: Ultimately, Between lapses of histories filters cultural heritage through the lens of spectacle. It is one artist’s experience with and understanding of the fetish of what is archaeological and museological, and an attempt to reckon with the role of contemporary art as it intersects with archive and socio-political consequences of their existence. The result is an existential crisis of aesthetic, in contradiction with action (of what actions have occurred [digs and collecting], what is happening [a societal reckoning with heritage], and what could happen [restitution and a re-imagining of cultural preservation]). At the same time, I think It does not pose any particular challenge to the legal and institutional structures that are examined. It left me wondering what is next. 

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– Mexico City and Philadelphia, 2023

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Gala Porras-Kim: Between lapses of histories
curated by Virginia Roy
February 11 – September 17, 2023
University Museum of Contemporary Art, Mexico City
https://muac.unam.mx/exposicion/gala-porras-kim
Press release/text and supplemental materials are available here

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Lapsed Journeys of Artifacts: a conversation on Gala Porras-Kim @ MUAC by David Ayala-Alfonso and Malkia Okech is licensed under Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International

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