This year’s Special Project at the Pavilion of Applied Arts in Venice is the 10th collaboration between the V&A and la Biennale. For this year’s pavilion the art director of this edition, the late Koyo Kouoh (1967 – 2025), selected the Colombian-Korean-American artist Gala Porras-Kim. Her installation examines how museum practices – of curation, conservation and classification – are never neutral acts but actively shape the meaning of the objects they aim to preserve.
By foregrounding the traces of intervention, from reconstructed textile patterns to the gestures of curators at work, Porras-Kim reveals the creative and ethical decisions embedded in custodianship. “This exhibition”, the artist explains of her drawings, sculptures and videos, “looks at how the process of decay defined by an institution – fire, movement, moisture, water, sun, exposure, dissociation, theft, mould and pests – can be generative”.
For example, Porras-Kim has created large-scale drawings of decayed fragments of fabrics from the V&A’s Stein collection, dating between 200 BC and 1200 AD, which were so fragile that they had to be placed on backing material. Her meticulous renderings, which resemble those that document archaeological finds, emphasise how the scattered pieces have been arranged by a curator or conservator in such a way that didn’t so much reconstruct the original fabric but inadvertently made a new pattern.
Porras-Kim, who lives and works between Los Angeles and London, explores how the process of disintegration and destruction reconstitutes museum objects into new forms. Other artworks on view include a cube of dust collected from the MET in New York after cases in the Oceanic, African and American galleries of the Rockefeller wing were deinstalled; a pointillist canvas made of mould spores collected from the stores of the British Museum; and a monochrome created using frass (insect larvae excrement) gathered in the Fowler Museum in Los Angeles, the residue left after moths ate their way through 49 objects in their collection.
Porras-Kim expands conventional ideas of damage, inviting us to consider how objects change when removed from their intended contexts. For example, in 1954 it was discovered that over the course of 23 years a V&A security guard called John Andrew Nevins had stolen over 2,000 objects from the museum, including Duncan Grant fabric that his wife turned into curtains for their flat, which Porras-Kim has reproduced here. “Through this act” she says, “the institutional ‘damage’ of theft recategorized the object from a museum ‘collection item’ back into a functional part of the home”.
Porras-Kim has also worked with objects that were recently deaccessioned from Young V&A after a long audit of their collections. She was fascinated to learn the laborious process of deaccessioning V&A museum objects. The 1983 National Heritage Act stipulates that the museum can only ‘deaccession’ an object from its collections if it is a duplicate, has become irreparably damaged, or if it has become ‘unsuitable’ for the collections and its disposal would not be detrimental to researchers or to the general public, or if it is transferred to another national UK museum.
Following museum protocol, before disposing of Young V&A objects they were first offered to other institutions. About 10 artefacts, including a Japanese Buddhist text, a print of St Nicholas and a disintegrated necklace went unclaimed and were brought by Porras-Kim to Venice. She has put them in a vitrine positioned so that direct sunlight will bleach the paper on which they are placed. Over the long run of the Biennale ghostly silhouettes will be created by the objects that would never have been exposed to light whilst hidden in storage.
“Contemporary interventions into historical material”, Porras-Kim says, “through conservation, registration and display, often form a new idea of an object”. Her work, in focusing on the eroding edges of objects and their classifications, reminds us that museums are not static repositories, but sites where material histories continue to evolve.
The exhibition is on view at the Venice Biennale in the Pavilion of Applied Arts, Sale d’Armi A, Arsenale from 9 May – 22 November 2026
