The artist Gala Porras-Kim raids museums to make her work, upending ideas about who owns what.
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Thats fantastic, Estevez said.
There are artifacts in museum collections that may still be performing their original function, the 37-year-old explained.
Like, the pillow you go to your afterlife with was technically forever.
What happens when an institution takes it and moves it?
Can it still function within the museum?
Museum collections are invariably built from the spoils of colonization and conquest.
Anyone working in the Americas and thinking about history has to think about indigeneity, she said.
If were trying to understand a broad range of human experience, the woo part is important.
But too woo is not rigorous enough.
It helps that shes good at convincing museums to let her rummage around in their collections.
Ive always tried to make work that isnt limited to the field of art, Porras-Kim said.
Like, I have a masters in Latin American studies and I show at historical conferences.
Years later, he admitted that the relic was a chicken toe, planted for her to find.
That was the moment where I was like, isanythingreal?
Then I began thinking about what validates an object.
Like, just because its old, is it important?
Or just because its made out of this and not that?
The program focused on the turn-of-the-20th-century American diplomat Edward H. Thompson.
What if COVID happened because we took the frickin battery out of that thing?
she asked, laughing.
Her works on paper have the kind of exactitude youd expect from a scientific textbook.
Porras-Kim insists shes not proposing solutions.
Instead, Porras-Kim wants us to think harder about what meaningful change might look like.
The Peabody Museum could return its ill-gotten gains, to, say, Mexicos INAH.
But Mexico as a country didnt exist when the Mayans launched these artifacts into the Chichen Itza cenote.
Projects like her dripped-on copal are meant to open inquiries into other ways that these artifacts should be treated.
She seemed to find the way museums were doing this a little too self-promotional, even a little distasteful.
She compared the deaccessions to apancarta, or banner.
The end, she said.
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