Gala Porras-Kim’s Tour of Frieze Masters
A meteorite, a pair of Egyptian eyes and a conceptual cola bottle – the artist introduces her favourite works at the fair
A meteorite, a pair of Egyptian eyes and a conceptual cola bottle – the artist introduces her favourite works at the fair
‘Going through the fair is different to going through a museum because it feels more immediate,’ says Gala Porras-Kim. The contemporary artist, whose own practice tackles ideas of display, curation and conservation in museum and gallery settings, selects objects and works from across millennia at Frieze Masters that spark new questions about where materials end and artworks begin, and how we might encounter them and their histories today.
At Art Ancient (Stand E1), Porras-Kim is drawn to a meteorite that landed in Russia 4.5 billion years ago and has since been sliced to expose its glittering interior. ‘Who made this object?’, she asks, probing the many human decisions made in the presentation of the specimen. It was the Brazilian conceptual artist Cildo Meireles who made Porras-Kim realise that ‘an artwork could be not in the work itself, but could exist in this independent circuit of information.’ At Luisa Strina and Galatea’s joint presentation (Stand S15) in Spotlight, Porras-Kim loves the playfulness of one of Meireles’s Insertions into Ideological Circuits (1970) – a cola bottle with hidden messages sent back into circulation.
A Nazca feather tunic from 100 BCE at Paul Hughes Fine Arts (Stand G11) allows Porras-Kim to ‘time travel’ – bird’s feathers turn into human clothing and now into an ‘outfit’ for a home through its striking, ‘flattened’ display. At Rupert Wace (Stand F12), Porras-Kim finds a pair of ‘eerie’ glass-inlaid Egyptian eyes that, even today, offer ‘visions of the afterlife’. We leave Porras-Kim in front of a vast canvas by Samia Halaby at Sfeir-Semler Gallery (Stand F11) in Studio: ‘it’s like I’m standing in a field and the wind itself is moving’.
See Porras-Kim’s work at Sprüth Magers (Stand D32), Frieze London, including her pencil drawing Future spaces replicate earlier spaces (shell instruments) (2023), which explores ancient shell instruments and their lost communicative contexts.
Further Information
Frieze London and Frieze Masters, The Regent’s Park, 15 – 19 October 2025.
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