Gala Porras-Kim’s work investigates the institutional frameworks that define, legitimize, and preserve cultural heritage, looking at the global circulation of pre-colonial artifacts extracted from their original sites and stored in museum collections in the West. Porras-Kim’s work questions the ethical principles of museum conservation while inviting the viewer to assign new meanings to artifacts displayed within institutions. CAM will present Porras-Kim’s first major survey exhibition in the Midwest, featuring multiple bodies of recent work, including drawings, sculpture, text pieces, and artifacts.

Gala Porras-Kim: Correspondences towards the living object is organized for the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis by Wassan Al-Khudhairi, Chief Curator, with Misa Jeffereis, Assistant Curator.

Gala Porras-Kim (b. 1984, Bogotá, Colombia; lives and works in Los Angeles) received an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts and an MA in Latin American Studies from the University of California, Los Angeles. Her solo exhibitions include the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2019); Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito, CA (2018); and LABOR, Mexico City (2017). Selected group exhibitions include 34th Bienal de São Paulo, Brazil (2021); Gwangju Biennale, South Korea (2020-21); Ural Industrial Biennial, Ekaterinburg, Russia (2019); Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2019, 2017); Palazzo Ca’tron, Venice, Italy (2019); PinchukArtCentre, Kiev, Ukraine (2019); and Tina Kim Gallery, New York (2019 and 2018). Porras-Kim is the recipient of the Art Matters Grant (2019), Radcliffe Fellowship for Advanced Study at Harvard University (2019), Artadia Award (2017), Rema Hort Mann Foundation grant (2017), and the Joan Mitchell Foundation Award (2016), among others. Porras-Kim’s work is in the collections of Brooklyn Museum, New York; FRAC Pays de la Loire, Carquefou, France; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Perez Art Museum, Miami; Seoul Museum of Art, South Korea; and Whitney Museum of American Art.