Join us for a rich conversation between artist Gala Porras-Kim and Mariana Fernández, writer, curator, and author of “A Museum for the Afterlife,” published in the fall issue of X-TRA Contemporary Art Journal, Volume 24, Number 2. In her essay, Fernández looks closely at Porras-Kim’s practice of challenging museological norms of preservation and presentation of repatriated objects, divorced from their context, stripped of their history. How might a museum honor the rituals intended for these objects, and allow for their natural decay and ephemerality? What repair is possible once life’s cycles have been disrupted, and the sanctity of burial, interrupted? Porras-Kim and Fernández will discuss the responsibility of care museums have to those who have passed, and expand their discussion into the politics of taxonomy and categorization. Image: 70 offerings for the rain at the Peabody Museum, 2021. Graphite and ink on paper, 47 × 35 ½ in. (framed: 48 ½ × 36 ½ × 2 in.). Courtesy of Commonwealth and Council, Los Angeles. Photo: Paul Salveson.