This piece appears in the columns section of frieze 249, ‘Object Lessons’
In January 2024, museums across the US closed exhibitions, removed objects from view and covered up displays. Under significant revisions to the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) – a federal law first introduced in the 1990s mandating the return of select Indigenous American funerary objects – institutions retrieved objects to figure out how to comply with a newly expedited five-year repatriation timeline. A few months earlier, in October 2023, the Smithsonian Institution and the German government had announced the return of some of the Benin Bronzes – hundreds of sculptures, plaques and ornaments plundered by British soldiers in 1897 from Benin City, in what is now Nigeria. Most recently, in November 2024, 1,440 trafficked antiquities, valued at more than US$10.4 million, were returned to India through the Manhattan District Attorney’s office. Finally, after years of protest, the wheels of cultural restitution are turning.
Of course, this is just the beginning. (A NAGPRA database lists some 96,000 Native American human remains as still in museum collections.) But the restitution of some of these artefacts has already instigated new questions. In Benin, for example, as the objects return, will they be shown behind glass with accompanying texts as they were in the west? Many artefacts are returning to long-awaited burial sites, but for others, their original contexts no longer exist.
Repatriation is not the end; rather, it raises crucial questions around museology, healing and care, themes which have long animated the practice of Gala Porras-Kim. Born in Bogotá and now based in Los Angeles, Porras-Kim seeks to reprogramme the ideology – or ‘software’ – of museums: collection, conservation, exhibition, taxonomy. Her work is perhaps best characterized as engaged in the process not of repatriation but of ‘rematriation’ – a concept put forward by Indigenous women’s groups that seeks to repair ancestral relationship to the land and to restore various ontological and epistemological approaches that have been erased through western museology.
Throughout her ten-year career, Porras-Kim has explored many alternative ways of honouring the materials housed within museum collections, usually through an unusual focus on such elemental qualities as dust, water and air. She has proposed ‘rehydrating’ votive objects that were once submerged in a sacred cenote to return them to their original owner, the Mayan rain god Chaac (Mediating with the Rain, 2021). She has communed with unidentified human remains within a museum collection using encromancy, producing swirled marble paper landscapes of otherworldly desire (A terminal escape from the place that binds us, 2021). Most recently, she turned Storefront for Art and Architecture, New York, into a hothouse to display a tray of mud sourced from the Yucatan peninsula, which the curators describe, in their accompanying exhibition text, as a ‘living archive’ (The motion of an alluvial record, 2024).
Objects change irrevocably when they enter the museum, Porras-Kim suggests. In her solo show ‘Precipitation for an Arid Landscape’ (2021) at Amant, New York, she displayed a slab of copal (a resin frequently used by Mayans in the fabrication of their ceremonial offerings) infused with dust from the Harvard’s Peabody archives and rehydrated it with a drip of water every 30 seconds. Even if the museum won’t allow a full rehydration, she symbolically attempts to returns this object to its former Mayan use-context. In this way, her practice makes artefacts resemble diasporic subjectivities: a ceremonial vase displaced from its original contexts, with no real home – or, perhaps, too many – to return to. Her symbolic homecomings do not necessarily assert that old, non-western ways of thinking are better, or that some pre-enlightenment form of thinking can heal us. Instead, she wants to avoid an ‘epistemological monoculture’, as she told me this winter, in which western museology is our only option for care.
Porras-Kim’s work is akin to the practice of Cameron Rowland, who uses the language of conceptual art – documentation, readymade ‘artefacts’, economic contracts – to reveal the art world’s imbrication in histories of slavery, redlining and other kinds of enclosure. In a work like Plot (2024), featured in his current exhibition, ‘Properties’, at Dia:Beacon, Rowland legally designated a portion of land owned by the institution to be repurposed for the acknowledgement of the unmarked graves of enslaved African Americans that might dwell underneath. Drawing from law scholar Cheryl Harris’s seminal 1993 essay ‘Whiteness as Property’, Rowland troubles the historical equivalence between whiteness and property ownership. What might be its implications in museum spaces, which are temples to the conservation of property?
Rather than institutional critique, we might characterize Rowland’s and Porras-Kim’s practices as institutional entanglement. Their projects involve in-depth research into an institution’s holdings (both financial and cultural) and their geographic histories. Today, we might also see the artists as part of a larger ecosystem of workers, including those hired to oversee restitutional processes, who are trying to reprogramme the museum from the inside out. What would it mean if the institution, and the people within it, were not monolithically antagonized, but recognized as actors with whom to rewrite its interiors? Or if the moral position of the artist were greyer: less an oppositional figure ‘outside’ of the institution but, rather, one tasked with being a consultant or trickster within it?
Kim and Porras-Kim make visible the submerged histories of racialized labour that undergird the museum’s software.
While both artists share an interest in treating the museum and its location within racial capitalism as their site, they differ in their approaches: Rowland might be said to adopt a more ‘paranoid’ perspective that seeks to reveal, expose and entangle. Porras-Kim, on the other hand, could be viewed as operating a ‘reparative’ approach, looking for poetic and symbolic forms of restoration. A pessimistic way of reading this is that the horizon of change has diminished so much that artists are resigned to the slow work of impossible reform. More optimistically, and less linearly, it might just be that the strategies of institutional critique are diversifying.
Perhaps the most trenchant critique of the imbrication of art, property and racialization today can be found in scholar Eunsong Kim’s 2024 book The Politics of Collecting, in which she traces how the mid-19th-century consolidation of wealth in the hands of US robber barons and monopolies through violent union-busting also constructed the philosophies of accumulation, acquisition and taxonomization that characterize museums today.
One useful history that Kim analyzes is of the famous robber baron Andrew Carnegie, founder of the Carnegie Institute, now the Carnegie Museums, where Porras-Kim will open an exhibition this month. Kim’s book zeroes in on the 1892 Homestead strike – a violent labour dispute between the Carnegie Steel Company and its workers in Homestead, Pennsylvania – as a turning point that enabled Carnegie’s vast accumulation of wealth and irrevocably neutered the power of labour unions in the US. The strategies employed by Carnegie and his fellow robber baron Henry Clay Frick – including counterinsurgency, private militia and corporate spies – are anti-labour strategies that persist today. She argues that the contemporary museum shields this legacy through the smoke-screen of cultural heritage and preservation.
Three years after the Homestead strike, in 1895, the Carnegie Institute was formed, including the galleries that would eventually become the Carnegie Museum of Art. Porras- Kim’s newest project considers one aspect of this institutional history: how objects were taxonomized as ‘art’, ‘science’ or ‘information’, depending on their respective institutions – the Carnegie Museum of Art, the Carnegie Museum of Natural History or the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh. Kim has shown how this same taxonomic system emerged from the aftermath of the Homestead strike, when Carnegie and Frick implemented principles of scientific labour management by Frederick Winslow Taylor, now known as ‘Taylorism’, to create divisions between skilled and unskilled labour. She argues that this distinction produced a category of ‘mind work’ for a managerial class that made it possible for artist Marcel Duchamp to create a readymade artwork (skilled) out of a factory- produced urinal (unskilled).
Together, Kim and Porras-Kim make visible the submerged histories of racialized labour that undergird the museum’s software. When I asked Porras-Kim what her dream project there might be, she said the creation of a taxonomic system that could account for multiple epistemologies and might even, perhaps, generate new ways of being: ‘This information would ripple down in the institutional processes and redefine the roles of people interacting with it.’ What this new system might look like, and what kinds of subjects it might engender, will require both historical confrontation and extraordinary imagination.
This article first appeared in frieze issue 249 with the headline ‘Towards a New Museology’
Gala Porras-Kim’s ‘A Hand in Nature’ is on view at Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland, Ohio, until1 June and ‘Gala Porras-Kim: The reflection at the threshold of a categorical division’ will be on view at Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, from 1 March – 27 July
Main image: Gala Porras-Kim, 228 offerings for the rain at the Peabody Museum (detail), 2021, colored pencil and flashe on paper, 183 × 183 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Commonwealth and Council. Photo: Paul Salveson
