Gala Porras-Kim: Out of an instance of expiration comes a perrennial showing

Gasworks, London, 27 January – 27 March 2022

Gala Porras-Kim, A terminal escape from the place that binds us, 2021. Ink on paper, and document. Image courtesy the artist and Gasworks; photograph Andy Keate.

Imagine being a ghost, hanging out in an afterlife all meticulously planned and set up for your comfort, with dried foods, pets in urns to keep you company, some jewellery and a few model boats. Then things start disappearing from your spectral sitting room, and all of a sudden you find yourself stuck in an anodyne, over-lit hallway somewhere in the middle of the British Museum for the rest of your undead life. Such are the problems explored here by Colombian artist Gala Porras-Kim through a set of drawings and installations which prod at the unthinking outcomes of museum conventions around collection and storage. Ancient Egyptians had many ideas about what happened after death, though anthropological display in far off lands was not one of them. Several of Porras-Kim’s works offer solutions of sorts: the large pencil drawing Sights beyond the grave, 2022, depicts a desert landscape, creased in such a way that would enable it to sit propped up around a small funerary statue of a nobleman named Nenkheftka, currently on display at the British Museum. In his spectral disorientation, the drawing is meant to provide the small gesture of comfort of a familiar view. The sculpture Sunrise for 5th-dynasty Sarcophagus from Giza at the British Museum, 2022, is a full-size Styrofoam replica of the coffin, with a semi-circle marked out on the ground indicating a roughly 50º rotation. Ancient Egyptians buried their dead facing the rising run in the East; Porras-Kim’s work simply proposes that the museum take this into account in its display – at the very least, as a gesture towards the context from which it was taken, but perhaps even as a matter of access to some kind of afterlife.