GALA PORRAS-KIM RECONSTRUCTS THE ORIGINAL CONTEXT OF LOOTED PRE-HISPANIC OBJECTS AT KURIMANZUTTO

kurimanzutto presents Future spaces replicate earlier spaces, the first exhibition by Gala Porras-Kim (Bogotá, Colombia, 1984) at the gallery in Mexico City. For this project, the artist brings together different bodies of work that examine the relationship between museums and conservation institutions, the objects they shelter, and the contexts from which they were removed. Through processes of reconstruction and resituating, the exhibition considers how institutional frameworks reclassify and redefine these objects, and how their original spatial, material, and temporal conditions might be reestablished.

At the center of the exhibition is the installation The motion of an alluvial record (2024), originally developed for the Storefront for Art & Architecture, New York. The installation recreates within the gallery the atmospheric conditions of the marshlands of the Yucatán Peninsula, situating the works within an environment that mirrors the one from which their materials originate. Within this environment, a work composed of clay, mud, and sediment collected from these wetlands contains particles of both ancient and contemporary structures carried by water over time.

On the walls outside the atmospheric pavilion hang color drawings that replicate wall decorations from the Techinantitla complex in Teotihuacan. Murals from this site were chiseled into fragments and sold on the black market, later entering private collections and museums in the United States, Mexico, and Europe in the 1960s. Originally created as integral components of architectural surfaces, these images have been fragmented and recatalogued as discrete works. In the series Uprooted (2026), Porras-Kim portrays these fragments and presents them together, situating them near the floor in accordance with these original positions, so that the gallery space replicates aspects of the architectural conditions from which they were extracted.

Another group of works centers on the production of artist Brígido Lara (Veracruz, México, 1940), who, during the 1960s and 1970s, created “original interpretations” of ritual clay objects from the Totonac culture of Veracruz. Lara stated that his works entered museum collections, and can now be seen in institutions including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Saint Louis Art Museum, Missouri; and the Dallas Museum of Art, Texas, as well as others in France, Spain, and Belgium, where they were catalogued as unattributed ancient objects, indistinguishable from what institutions considered original artifacts. For years, they were exhibited as Pre-Hispanic works until Lara revealed his authorship and reclaimed them.

Porras-Kim presents a series of graphite drawings of these sculptures set against fully rendered graphite fields that function as reflective surfaces, in which the objects are accompanied by their own reflections, appearing as slight echoes alongside the image. This subtle mirroring introduces a doubling, suggesting the objects in relation to past images of themselves and foregrounding how Lara’s works occupy the position of ancient objects in the present, collapsing temporal distance.

The exhibition also includes two large-scale drawings of Maya stelae depicting the rulers of El Perú-Waka’: Lady K’abel (Stela 34) and K’inich B’ahlam II (Stela 33). Originally positioned facing one another as part of an architectural complex in Guatemala, these monuments were extracted and separated and are now held by the Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio, and the Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas, respectively. The drawings present them facing one another once more, reconstructing within the gallery the spatial relationship they originally held.

In this exhibition, the works bypass conventional systems of climate control, categorization, and display: by keeping eye level, and reestablishing spatial relationships, the gallery becomes a site where earlier conditions are actively reconstructed.

Future spaces replicate earlier spaces will be on display until June 13 at kurimanzutto, Gob. Rafael Rebollar 94, Col. San Miguel Chapultepec, Mexico City (Mexico).