Should human remains be kept in museums? Artist’s work reflects original resting places
- Korean-Colombian artist Gala Porras-Kim proposes different compromises that museums can make that better align with the relics’ intangible, spiritual function
- This year, the artist has been named one of the four finalists for the Korea Artist Prize, a major contemporary art award
It was during a trip to Gwangju in South Korea in early 2020 that artist Gala Porras-Kim came across a peculiar “object” in the collection of the city’s national museum – the human remains from a 1st-century BC shipwreck.
The bodies, originally found inside a millennia-old pot on the sunken vessel, were now housed in the museum’s storage, “organised by size and dimension of each of the parts – femur, arm, head – instead of as a whole”, she recalled in a recent interview.
Her eyes turned to the existence of these once-living individuals within the aseptic environment of today’s cultural institution.
What does it mean for these bodies to be removed from their final resting place and turned into preserved relics for archaeological study, with no regard for the afterlife they might have desired?
“Yes, the remains are an antiquity, but they never stop being a person,” she said.
She wrote to the director of the Gwangju National Museum, proposing that “we, as living people, will have to negotiate between our desires to think of them as historical objects, and the respect for the individual person”.