Driven by a fascination with ancient knowledge, Bogotá-born, Los Angeles-based artist Gala Porras-Kim pursues her interests through a range of approaches, from conversations with living communities and institutions to shamanic communions with the dead. Throughout her research-driven process, Porras-Kim also tests the contemporary structures—such as museum classification systems—that organize and determine our relationships with historical lore and the material remnants of cultures. She manifests the results of her investigations in varying forms, including written exchanges, installations, books, paintings, and sculptures. Porras-Kim’s longest running series, The Mute Object and Ancient Stories of Today (2012– ), homes in on the dozens of Zapotec languages that were passed down orally from the Indigenous peoples of Mesoamerica in what is now southern Mexico. Starting in the 16th century, the Oaxacan people translated some of the words in the tonal dialects into whistles in order to evade the understanding of Spanish colonizers. After painstakingly learning Zapotec herself, the artist used sound bites cut from YouTube videos—thus bypassing the limits of the muscles in human mouths—to fully reinterpret recordings of spoken Zapotec narratives as whistles, creating the vinyl LP Whistling and Language Transfiguration (2012). At a 2013 show at the Los Angles gallery Commonwealth and Council, she also invited audiences to make rubbings from replicas of stone artifacts bearing examples of Zapotec glyphs, the meanings of which have been lost, and asked viewers to decode the signs, thus reviving fragments of a now- inscrutable, pre-colonial past with new meanings.

• Gala Porras-Kim
• Cleo Roberts-Komireddi