Gala Porras-Kim

For her presentation at Kunsthalle Bern, Porras-Kim asks what role museums play in perpetuating dominant narratives and what it would mean to question the conditions of artifact guardianship: how can we care for artifacts beyond institutional logics? In her exhibition at Kunsthalle Bern, Porras-Kim incorporates living matter, such as clay, sediment, and silt from the wetlands of the Yucatán Peninsula, or ash from the fire of the National Museum of Brazil, as well as dust collected from the Peabody Museum in the United States. She invites the elements to interact with water, humidity, matter and infrastructures, thus actively looking at the idea of museums as sterile spaces, and playfully manipulating the rules of display. The result is an exhibition that turns conventional museum climate concepts upside down.

Gala Porras-Kim (*1984) was born in Bogotá, Colombia, and is based between Los Angeles and London. She has had solo exhibitions at MOCA Cleveland (2025), Storefront for Art and Architecture, New York (2024), Museum of Contemporary Art Denver (2024), MUAC Mexico (2024), the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul (2023), Gasworks, London (2022), and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2019), among others. Her works have been featured in major group exhibitions including the Walker Art Center (2025), Liverpool Biennial (2023), 34th Bienal de São Paulo (2021), the Gwangju Biennale (2021), and the Whitney Museum of American Art (2019, 2017).