by Jayne Wilkinson // June 3, 2025
This article is part of our feature topic Legality.
In 2017, the government of New Zealand Aotearoa granted personhood to the Whanganui River, legislation that “combined Western legal precedent with Māori understanding of the river as an indivisible and living whole, and as the spiritual ancestor of the Whanganui Iwi (a Māori tribe).” This definition is not only a protective measure but marks a conceptual and material shift in western epistemologies and legal frameworks, where non-human entities are rarely afforded consideration, especially not under legislation developed to support colonization and capitalist expansion. Gala Porras-Kim’s exhibition, ‘Conditions for recognising a living stone’ (2024), begins from a rethinking of such assumptions, exploring what constitutes personhood—if a river, a corporation or a deity is a legal person, why not a statue?—and how cultures, institutions and religions assign different meanings to objects over time.
Cover of Pina Issue 1 // Courtesy of Pina Magazine
The premise is outlined in the opening remarks to this “exhibition-in-print,” published in the first issue of Pina magazine: “Can we recognise the agency of Nenkheftka, the ancient Egyptian person that believes to have reincarnated in his Ka sculpture, currently on view at the British Museum? How can our contemporary world and laws accommodate the ongoing lives of people from the past, in whatever form they have taken or might take?” The statue of Nenkheftka, the living stone of the title, was taken from Egypt by the British in 1897 and has been on continual display since. The purpose of this statue was to house the Ka, or spirit, of its original owner for the infinite span of time constituting the afterlife; it was one of 12 statues of Nenkheftka and his wife produced for his tomb. These kinds of rituals, as well as the dubious legislative practices surrounding the system of veiled protectorates and colonial excavation laws that protected their removal by the British, are outlined in great detail and constitute the primary “works” of the exhibition: a conversation between the artist and collaborators Matt Blaze (an Egyptologist and archaeologist), Chloe Evans (an immigration lawyer) and Catalina Imizcoz (an exhibitions researcher and editor of Pina); an advocacy letter outlining the facts of the case, addressed to the Borough of Camden from “J.UN.E.—Justice for Unrecognized Entities,” the non-governmental organization they initiated to legally intervene on Nenkheftka’s behalf; and archival photographs, screengrabs, communications and research notes that annotate the legal argument with evidence.
Page spread, Gala Porras-Kim: ‘Conditions for recognising a living stone’ // Courtesy of the artist and Pina
Rather than in a gallery or a book, this breadth of research is presented in Pina, a serial publication that commissions artists to produce 60-page exhibitions for the flat space of the magazine. It’s a format that effortlessly aligns with the content, and Porras-Kim’s engagement with the medium might best be described as an aesthetics of annotation. It is directed, citational, legally precise and historically accurate research brought together through a mix of time periods, ephemera and evidential texts and dialogues that would never likely be combined in an academic publication, nor would it be as legible in a gallery. The through-line is structured by the repeating page spreads, with the advocacy letter printed on one side and a range of image annotations, explanatory texts and “Dear Reader”-style directives on the other. Specific clauses are emphasized, in the administrative yellow of highlighters and legal pads, to correspond with supporting visual material (or “enclosures”); page numbers are replaced by bracketed footnotes to navigate between the terse legalese of the letter and fluid sections of dialogue.
Pina Issue 1: Gala Porras-Kim // Courtesy of the artist and Pina
Though the format could easily become dry, it’s riveting, as the story of Nenkheftka is briskly narrativized and unfolds with such care and complexity that it bears repeat readings. The annotations not only augment but also unravel the contexts required to interpret what constitutes the rights of personhood, in both sardonic and serious ways. Wikipedia screenshots, excavation requests, accession files, aerial maps and tomb reconstructions sit alongside more tangential material related to historical and contemporary discourses around rights: Britney Spears and Free Britney posters, AI renderings of Egyptian tombs, Napoleonic portraits, a photo showing the skeleton of King Richard III unearthed in a parking lot, mummy paint and other evidence of the necrophiliac “mummy craze” in 19th century British society.
Free Nenkheftka t-shirt // Courtesy of the artist and Pina
The process-as-artwork strategy is familiar to conceptual art but is rarely used to evoke such empathy with a protagonist or as a means of its own explanation. Deploying the legal framework of correspondence and “exposure” is perhaps the work’s true form, permitting image and text, annotation and footnote, logical narration, causality and, above all, the merging of speculation with evidence and legal precedent. By the end, we are convinced of the rights of Nenkheftka’s Ka to a better life in the museum. Built into this is a foundational question of ethics: I may not share your spiritual beliefs, but I support your right to beliefs, even if millennia have passed. The point at which the spiritual sites of one culture become the (suspiciously acquired) art objects of another prompts questions from the collaborators around the conditions that allow colonizing forces to consider some objects or gravesites sacred, but not others. And, in print, this engenders a type of intimacy that is rare in a gallery, as you return to think through the multitudes of issues that spill out of an idea you can hold in your hand. To connect with a person from thousands of years ago is necessarily speculative, but it can also be a recognition that spirit or belief can exist both forward and backward in a continuum of time that is non-linear.
Nenkheftka // Courtesy of the artist and Pina
Although aligned with institutional and museological critique, Porras-Kim is not so concerned about art as a form of activism. Rather, her material sensitivity and probing curiosity asks us to consider the much longer timelines of the before- and after-lives of objects, shifting the perspective from ownership to personhood, from observation to agency. Ancient peoples probably didn’t dream of an afterlife of invasion, theft or grave-digging, nor of their spiritual bodies becoming luxury art objects on permanent display in a brightly lit, cold, damp place. But, in a timeline that includes the geologic life of limestone and the spiritual life of eternity, a few hundred years in a museum might hardly register.
