NEW YORK, NY.- Bortolami gallery is presenting an exhibition of new work by German-Kurdish artist Melike Kara. Materially symphonic, Kara employs painting, installation, and photography to map heritage, origin, and belonging. For this exhibition, the artist expands the registers from which we identify, previously centered on cultural affiliation, to include her new role as mother. In exploring the attenuation of self and tradition under the expansive condition of motherhood, the artist intwines a new web of associations that marries history and the contemporary moment from which she speaks.
Explore the powerful art of Melike Kara. Click here to discover "Melike Kara: Where We Meet /anglais" on Amazon and delve into her exploration of heritage, origin, and belonging through painting, installation, and photography.
For was uns bleibt—what we have left—Kara has woven rose-colored texts and black and white images into a wallpaper-like collage spanning the length of the exhibition wall. The fragmented and borrowed texts and associated images approach a collective, yet inherently subjective, image of motherhood— the generative conduit through which care and home is passed and, with this, inevitably lost and transformed. Overlayed and wheatpasted, this skin acts like a literal membrane, made up of multiple strata of translucent paper that together cohere and dissolve into a unitary mass. The installation, an intertextual network, provides a definition of motherhood that is protean and elastic, guided by the artist’s own principles rather than societally enforced norms. Kara’s visual glossary is multilingual with texts reproduced in German, the language through which she speaks, dreams, and communicates with her own child; Kurdish, the mother tongue of her maternal figures; and English, the de-facto language of New York City, host to the exhibition.
These inquiries relate to and spring from an archival project begun by the artist in 2014. Made up of images gathered from both personal and public sources, the artist has been amassing an archive of the Kurdish diaspora, past and present. This roving library roots the life of this de-territorialized group to the abstract, yet materially concrete, spaces built through the layering of these photographs. Here, the memories of the Kurdish people and their narratives evade erasure by transforming exhibition and artmaking into sites and acts of remembrance and preservation. The result is a glossary that comprehensibly reenforces an aesthetic principle: the beauty of lives lived, in motion.
Two suites of abstract paintings, jewel-toned green and red monochromes respectively, are extensions of the artist’s pictorial atlas. Kara, a student of Rosemarie Trockel, treats each gestural line like a thread coalescing into a complex tapestry, borrowing patterns and knotting techniques from Kurdish looms. Ornamentation shares the migratory patterns of the Kurdish population, combining into novel motifs as it resettles into new geographies. Kara here chooses to articulate from the abstracted language of weaving, a feminized vocabulary and form of labor. Produced intuitively with oil stick, the artist’s individual strokes score the surface of her canvas, congealing through rhythmic repetition, while the slack of each thread-like line evinces a potential unraveling. Kara likens the ritualizing repetition of her tandem line thread to identity’s formation, borrowing a theory from diasporic Caribbean thinker Édouard Glissant: identification is a dynamic process, just as singular threads congeal into a patterned fabric, individual identities are formed through the interplay of various rites, experiences, and histories.
Melike Kara (b. 1985) lives and works in Cologne, Germany. An exhibition of her work is currently up at the Peter and Irene Ludwig Foundation in Aachen, Germany. In 2022, she was included in 58th Carnegie International, Pittsburgh, curated by Sohrab Mohebbi. Solo exhibitions by Kara have been held across museums in Europe including at Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt (2024); Neue Galerie Gladbeck (2022); and Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam (2019). Her work can be found in museum collections including Centre Pompidou, Paris; FRAC des Pays de la Loire, France; Yuz Museum, Shanghai; LACMA, Los Angeles, and Museum Ludwig, Cologne.
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