Inside the Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver, little pieces of Antarctica were melting: cross-sections of an ice core from the continent’s Newall Glacier, each one about the size of a beverage coaster and encased in a vacuum-sealed plastic bag. Artist Gala Porras-Kim watched approvingly during a visit last month, pointing out the air pockets that had started to form.

“The ice cores are an archive of ancient air, because the air gets stuck in the layers of ice,” she said, pointing at the display during an interview at the museum. This particular core, which Porras-Kim had obtained from the National Science Foundation’s Ice Core Facility in nearby Lakewood, Colorado, contained ice that had formed some 10,000 years ago, around the beginning of the Holocene period, in geological terms.

Porras-Kim, an interdisciplinary artist who often questions how museums collect material from previous civilisations, was also planning to debut what she called an “ice performance” at the opening of her solo exhibition Mar 8: “Gala Porras-Kim: A Hand in Nature.” That night, and at monthly intervals thereafter, an unsealed piece of the core would be placed on a silver tray and allowed to thaw. “The ancient air will get released into this room – a reunion of this old air with the new air, mixing together,” she said, describing it as an “organic de-accession process.”

The exhibition at MCA Denver is the largest museum solo the 39-year-old artist has had in the United States. It follows her busy year of one-person exhibitions, at the UCLA Fowler Museum, the Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art in Seoul, South Korea, and the Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo in Mexico City, among other venues. And next spring Porras-Kim, who is based in Los Angeles and London, will have a solo show at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh.

The artist brings a new and refreshing perspective to some of the most important, and confounding, questions in the field today: how to preserve and display the artifacts of ancient people and Indigenous cultures in prominent museums, and whether to keep them at all or engage in restitution. Her art often unfolds through dialogues with directors, curators and conservators, memorialised in formal letters that suggest ways to restore a sense of spirituality and ritual to objects that have been wrested from their original contexts. In person she has an upbeat, optimistic way of speaking, conveying a persuasive confidence that museums can correct their troubled histories if they are willing to think more like artists.

Often, Porras-Kim’s arguments are at odds with the museum’s imperative to preserve what was taken. One of her projects, “Precipitation for an Arid Landscape,” proposes that remnants of ceremonial offerings that had been dredged from a sacred cenote at Chichén Itzá in Mexico and moved to Harvard’s Peabody Museum be “rehydrated” with rainwater and copal resin, because the Mayan god of rain, Chac, remains their rightful owner. “The rain is still around,” Porras-Kim has said in previous interviews, and who can argue with that logic?

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The child of two scholars – her Colombian father is an “old-school historian” and her South Korean mother more “postmodern,” she said – Porras-Kim spent her early years in Bogota, Colombia, and then moved to Spain. Her family eventually settled in Los Angeles, after her mother had enrolled in a doctoral program at UCLA and Porras-Kim and her father were able to obtain political asylum. Porras-Kim almost followed her parents into academia; after earning a Master of Fine Arts from CalArts, she earned another master’s degree in Latin American Studies from UCLA. She came back to art because, she said, it encompassed so many other fields: “I see museums as a box, a container, that is always changing to fit whatever the collection is.”

The Denver exhibition is unusual for Porras-Kim in that the museum has no permanent collection for her to respond to. So she found another kind of collection nearby, at the Ice Core Facility, where about 25,000 meters of ice are neatly stashed in metal tubes within a giant freezer kept at -38 Celsius. About 2,000 meters a year are deaccessioned to make room for new samples; this is how Porras-Kim was able to get the cores for her exhibition.

“I have mixed emotions about seeing them melt,” the facility’s head curator, Curt La Bombard, said when Porras-Kim and I visited the exhibition. “But that’s the point – reaching a new audience that may not have been exposed to what we’re doing in climate science. The last thing we want to do is dispose of these in such a way that they have no value for anybody.”

At the MCA, several of the works present the carefully controlled museum environment as an illusion. Spores gathered from the storage facilities of the British Museum multiplied on an agar-soaked cloth; moisture piped across the gallery from a dehumidifier dripped through a graphite-saturated fabric, making an abstract drawing on a panel placed on the floor.

Porras-Kim also made a site-specific artwork out of a defect in the museum building: the large crack that almost bisects its picture window, which appeared a little over a year ago during a winter marked by extreme fluctuations in temperature. She has titled it “Currents through the fissure from controlling nature,” and has placed a bench nearby so that visitors can sit and examine it.

“The museum is trying to regulate temperature within this box, but the climate doesn’t care. The tension between the two is always going to make this crack,” she explained as we looked out through the glass to the street below. As with the melting ice cores, which are displayed next to the broken window, she is most interested in the idea of air escaping a container. “The title is not so much about the crack,” she said, “but how the air is coming through.”

Porras-Kim’s art can be described as a new variant of institutional critique, the movement associated with 1970s-era works by artists such as Michael Asher and Hans Haacke; these artists were known for calling attention to the physical and social infrastructure of the art world. She studied at CalArts with Asher – and credits his radical but intellectually rigorous approach as well as the highly conceptual and philosophical art of Charles Gaines (another of her teachers) as strong influences on her thinking about historical collections. “How do we move from just prioritising the material, when there are some things beyond the material that could be preserved better?” she said. “You see it easily when you look at conceptual art, which is immaterial. What are the conservation directions for something that is installed in your head?”

Porras-Kim’s inquiries feel especially apt at a time of increasing self-scrutiny by museums, as they navigate calls for restitution and, in the United States, new federal regulations around the display of Native American cultural objects. “There’s a great deal of anxiety that surrounds institutions, particularly since the pandemic era,” said cultural consultant Andras Szanto, the author of a book on the future of museums. “It makes this kind of work feel very urgent because museums themselves are feeling their way and trying to arrive at the right balance. For an artist to be part of that conversation, but with nuance and complexity and not just landing the cheap shots, is a very welcome thing.”

Her suggestions to museums, however, are sometimes at odds with the new directives to return objects to their geographic places of origin. “Most of the museums I’ve worked with have a singular, Western point of view,” Porras-Kim said. “It’s not as simple as saying we can copy-paste backward and just return something.” NYT