Gala Porras-Kim: Precipitation for an Arid Landscape

Join us for the opening of Precipitation for an Arid Landscape, the first East Coast solo presentation of the work of Colombian-born, Los Angeles–based artist Gala Porras-Kim. 

Grounded in specific archaeological points of reference, the works consider the creation, acquisition, conservation, study, display, description, and circulation of art and cultural artifacts. Gala Porras-Kim shows how these processes displace an object’s original functions and instead shape a different sense of history, identity, and social relations. Aware of these constructs, Porras-Kim considers the lives and stories of the artifacts, raising questions about how objects speak, for whom, and for what purposes.

The exhibition centers on four recent installations, three of which are new commissions: Asymptote Towards an Ambiguous Horizon (2021), Precipitation for an Arid Landscape (2021), and Leaving the Institution Through Cremation Is Easier than as a Result of a Deaccession Policy (2021). Joining these is Proposal for the Reconstituting of Ritual Elements for the Sun Pyramid at Teotihuacán (2019). These projects are set in dialogue with several earlier, complementary works, which establish a deeper context of the artist’s practice. 

Gala Porras-Kim carried out part of her research for this exhibition while being Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies at Harvard University (2019–2020) and Artist in Residence at the Getty Research Institute (2020–2022). We would like to thank the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University for providing access to the archival material showcased in this exhibition.

This exhibition is organized and produced by Amant in cooperation with KADIST and is curated by Ruth Estévez and Adam Kleinman.

Also on view is Towards the New Baroque of Voices, the first solo show in New York of author and filmmaker Manthia Diawara. The new film-essay, of which the exhibition takes its title, presents a parliament of thinkers and artists edited together from Diawara’s archive of raw film footage dating from 1985 to the present. The voice and thought of Martinican philosopher and poet Édouard Glissant (1928–2011) provide a common thread through these imagined dialogues.