This film Gala Porras-Kim: Expansive Data Fields, features the LACMA Art + Technology Lab project Expansive Data Fields by Gala Porras-Kim. This project with encyclopedic museums is an exploration of the institutions cataloguing systems and how the way objects are registered affects how we understand cultural heritage. Porras-Kim interrogates the layers of interpretation imposed on these objects, examining the linguistic, material, and contextual information used to classify them. By rethinking the relationship between cultural objects and the institutions that preserve them, the project highlights the potential for alternative narratives and more inclusive ways of understanding cultural heritage. This aligns with Porras-Kim’s broader practice, utilizing museum archive research to inform her drawings, sculptures, and installations, for example the Chichén Itzá project depicting votive offerings originally found in the Sacred Cenote. Many of her projects attempt to challenge the politics of preservation, revealing gaps and erasures in institutional records and colonial legacies.

Gala Porras-Kim is a recipient of the 2023 LACMA Art + Technology Lab grant. Inspired by the spirit of LACMA’s original Art and Technology program (1967–71), which paired artists with technology companies in Southern California, the LACMA Art + Technology Lab supports artist experiments with emerging technology. The LACMA Art + Technology Lab is presented by Hyundai Motor.

Gala Porras-Kim (b. 1984, Bogotá)  makes work 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. It considers the way institutions shape inherited codes and forms and conversely, how objects can shape the contexts in which they are placed. Porras-Kim lives and works in Los Angeles and London. She received an MFA from CalArts and an MA in Latin American Studies from UCLA.  She was a Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University (2019), the artist-in-residence at the Getty Research Institute (2020-22), and currently a fellow at Museo delle Civiltà in Rome.