ACT Meets: Gala Porras-Kim & Sabel Gavaldon
Tune in for our ACT Meets with Los Angeles-based artist Gala Porras-Kim who will join us to discuss the challenges and sometimes perplexing situations that institutions face trying to represent artists’ conceptual and formal intentions adequately when exhibiting their work.
Thursday, June 17th of June 2021 // 17.00-18.00 BST// 12.00-13.00 EST // 9.00-10.00 PDT
Register to this Zoom event This event is in the past.
Gala will revisit her experience curating the second iteration of MOCA’s Open House exhibition series. For this exhibition, Gala selected artworks from its permanent collection, written records and email exchanges with some artists’ estates. This selection shows how precise communications, fragments of information from the past, or the lack of records influence the way institutions and their staff interpret, exhibit and transform art.
Artists represented in this exhibition included Dan Flavin, Felix Gonzalez Torres, Walead Beshty and more.
Discussion Outcomes
- To what extend can artists stipulate the way institutional collectors exhibit their art over time?
- What can artists do to protect the integrity of their work in the future when they are no longer around?
- Should artists let their art exist freely beyond themselves?
Gala Porras-Kim (Colombia/USA) investigates institutional and linguistic frameworks that define, legitimise and preserve cultural heritage. Gala’s work questions the ethical principles of museological conservation. It also invites us to imagine stories and give new meanings to artefacts displayed inside museum vitrines or kept in storage.
Gala’s work has been exhibited at Gwangju Biennale, Korea (2021); São Paulo Biennial, Brazil (2021); Whitney Biennial (2019); LACMA (2017); Seoul City Museum of Art (2017); Whitney Museum of American Art (2017); FRAC Pays de la Loire, France (2016); and the Made in LA Biennial, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2016).
She has received awards including Art Matters (2019), Artadia (2017), Joan Mitchell Foundation (2016), Creative Capital (2015) and the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation (2015). Forthcoming solo exhibitions in 2021 include Kadist NY and Gasworks London. Gala was a recent David and Roberta Logie Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard and current artist-in-residence at The Getty and Delfina Foundation.
What are the ACT Meets?
ACT Meets are periodical get-together sessions for sharing ideas, knowledge and questions about the professional aspects of our artistic practices. The sessions are open to ACT Alumni and participants enrolled in our programmes. A few times a year, we invite guests and the general public. If you want to know more about our artist programme ‘Getting it across: communicating your art practice', please click here. The next session starts on Monday, 6th of September 2021.
This Summer edition of the ACT Meets is open to everyone. Places are limited and previous registration is required to obtain your Zoom link. We will give priority to ACT Alumni and current participants, and artists. But we welcome curators, gallerists, collectors and the general public. The session will be held in English.