Gala Porras-Kim's work plays objects against their framing to consider how an artefact’s "message" is tempered by display, use, historic setting, and other modes of exchange. In particular, she often works with pre-Colombian objects, dead languages, and like archaeological fragments whose intention and original context have been obscured by time, or by inscription into another culture. In doing so, Porras-Kim presses the subjective nature of archaeology, as well as the general epistemology of all forms of historiographic science. If cultural history is a mode to consider where we come from, Porras-Kim's work teases that these background narratives are not only incomplete but may be contaminated by contemporary assumptions, wants, and biases around material culture and its presentation.