Gala Porras-Kim

Artist Talk

Fullerton Hall, Art Institute of Chicago, 111 S. Michigan Avenue, Chicago, IL 60603 (Map)


Gala Porras-Kim; Courtesy of the artist and Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles and Mexico City

Gala Porras-Kim (b. 1984, Bogotá) lives and works in Los Angeles. Her work is about the social and political contexts that influence how intangible things, such as sounds, language and history, have been framed through the fields of linguistics, history and conservation. The work considers the way institutions shape inherited codes and forms and conversely, how objects can shape the contexts in which they are placed. Porras-Kim received an MFA from CalArts and an MA in Latin American Studies from UCLA. She has had solo exhibitions at Kadist, Amant Foundation, Gasworks, London, and CAMSTL.


Forecasting Signal, 2021. Burlap, liquid graphite, ink, ambient water, panel. Installation dimensions variable. Photo: Paul Salveson; Courtesy the artist and Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles and Mexico City.

Her work has been included in the Whitney Biennial and Ural Industrial Biennial (2019), and Gwangju and Sao Paulo Biennales (2021). She was a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University (2019) and the artist-in-residence at the Getty Research Institute (2020-22), She is currently a fellow at Museo delle Civiltà in Rome.

To see more about Gala Porras-Kim, visit the following:

Commonwealth and Council

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