WHITNEY BIENNIAL 2019 CATALOG
CONTRIBUTING AUTHOR
Gala Porras-Kim
Born in 1984 in Bogotá Columbia; lives in Los Angeles, California
In 2016 Gala Porras-Kim found herself at a residency in South Oaxaca, in which those invited are encouraged to expand their work through different disciplines and engage with local communities. She heard there was a nearby population of indigenous people still speaking Chatino, a nearly extinct Mexican dialect that has never been written down. What unfolded was a collaboration with the community’s eldest members to develop an approximate writing system that could be used for public signs in the town. Together, they generated the characters and implemented them in such a way that would merge with their daily lives. What would have otherwise been a lost form of communication, was given new life, recorded and resuscitated for future generations.
While her creative process is anthropologically rigorous, the work of Gala Porras-Kim also retains a spirit of experimentation that only an artist looking from the outside-in can get away with. The work responds rather than merely describes, a liberty typically outside of the field of anthropology. This unorthodox approach to the questions of cultural legacy also reflects her education. She holds two Master's degrees: an MFA from CalArts, and a second in Latin American Studies from UCLA. Her unconventional inclinations often result in hybrid reconstructions of traditional forms that are often both aesthetic and functional. One example of her transformative compositions is manifest in her LP Whistling and Language (2012), in which she translates Zapotec folktales into their musical cipher once used as a means of dissent. In this way, our capacity to access the information of unfamiliar cultures is opened up through a hybrid form.
Other works engage similar themes, but from within the institutions that collect ethnographic objects. 78 west Mexico ceramics from the LACMA collection: Nayarit Index, 2017 is a large-scale drawing that acts as a faithful recording of the figurative ceramics it describes. The illustration depicts this group of objects arranged sequentially on five shelves. They are organized by scale. As an “index” the work points to the debacle of not only classifying ancient objects in the first place, but also a larger museological dilemma— where do these objects sit in our collective consciousness today? —Lola Kramer