Drawing constitutes a fundamental aspect of Porras-Kim’s practice, wherein her intricately detailed images serve as a way to examine and reconsider historical objects and their contexts. On the gallery’s ground floor hang two colour pencil drawings depicting marble tiles in Ravenna, Italy. The large-scale works San Vitale, Ravenna, marble floor reconstruction (both 2025) show portions of the church of San Vitale’s marble floor, which contain generations of conservation interventions.

In the diptych 69 containers at Carnegie Museum of Art or at Carnegie Museum of Natural History (2025), the artist portrays vessels which are divided by their categorisation into the respective collections. These images challenge the distinctions made between ‘art’ and ‘object’, revealing how bound these definitions are to the spaces that exhibit them. 51 Snuff boxes at Carnegie Museum of Art (2025) presents snuff boxes whose function changed upon their transfer to the art museum, fundamentally altering the context in which they are read.

A terminal escape from the place that binds us (2025) addresses a different aspect of museological transformation. Here, Porras-Kim considers the afterlife of two-thousand-year-old human remains held by the Gwangju National Museum in South Korea. In a letter to the museum’s director, she calls into question at what point the agency over one’s body ceases. Accompanying the letter is a large-scale work where marbled paper constitutes an image of a location—a topographical landscape of vivid pigment swirls, suggesting an alternative, self-determined final resting place. A refreshing approach to institutional critique, the work questions the colonial ideology behind the encyclopaedic museum and proposes nuanced ways of representing the ancient past.

Five smaller drawings concern themselves with collection drawers, which previously served as ‘overspill’ storage for items from the Pitt Rivers that are now accessible to visitors. The displayed artefacts are secured in foam cutouts that place them within a composition. 1 Drawer C.61.14 with 2 Amulets, Charms and Religious & Divination Artefacts & House Ornaments – Asia at Pitt Rivers Museum (2025) depicts two amulets bound at their necks, arms, waists and feet by black bows, securing them within their storage drawer. The remarkable image visually represents the constraints imposed upon these objects, inviting viewers to contemplate their original purpose.

Nearby, the work All Earth energy sources are known to come from the Sun (2025) engages with the specifics of the gallery’s architecture: a rectangular brass sheet, designed in proportion to the gallery window and erected at a specific angle, reflects sunlight onto an adjacent wall, creating a bright, brilliant and ephemeral beam of light, which slowly burns a drawing onto the wall. Playing with themes of conservation and destruction, the structure is activated by a natural element beyond the artist’s control.