Pina is a commissioning platform and a portable exhibition space, giving artists a 60-page room to play. Pina issue #1 presents exhibitions by Gala Porras-Kim and Asad Raza. The artistic practice of Gala Porras-Kim is dedicated to thinking about the relationship between objects and the institutions that house them. For Pina, Porras-Kim has conceived ‘Conditions for recognising a living stone’: a legal case defending the labour and immigration rights of the Ka (life force) of Nenkheftka, an ancient Egyptian official who dwells in a statue kept at the British Museum. Joined by a team that includes a lawyer and an egyptologist, Porras-Kim’s exhibition seeks to restore Nenkheftka's agency in his afterlife plans. She examines the parameters of respecting beliefs about law, biology and religion across cultural, geographic and temporal spectrums. Accompanying it, is a conversation with Adam Kleinman, the writer, curator and Director of Kunsthall Trondheim, Norway; and ‘Bedtime Story’, a newly commissioned work of short fiction by Jessi Jezewska Stevens. In his work, Asad Raza conducts encounters within and beyond the exhibition, conceiving of art as a metabolic, active experience. For Pina, Raza has conceived ‘Array’, tracing the journey of radiation from sources across the universe to the trees used to produce the paper of the magazine, and then, reflected by that paper into the reader’s eye. Simultaneously an expansion and condensation of spatial and radiational temporalities, ‘Array’ is in direct response to the act of seeing, and the surface on which the magazine is printed. Accompanying Raza’s exhibition is a conversation with Karen Barad, Physicist and Distinguished Professor of Feminist Studies and Philosophy at the University of California, Santa Cruz; and ‘The Tree Daughter’, a newly commissioned work of short fiction by Akil Kumarasamy.
