Melike Kara

Press release

In her installations, Melike Kara explores identity as something constructed, embodied and always in flux. The wallpaper collage features photographs of her Kurdish-Alevi family from her personal archive, together with photographs, poems and stories about all other Kurdish 22 TOP areas. “To create an environment that explores what it means to be Kurdish (especially from my perspective, having been born in Western Europe), I have to include every part as there is no concrete country to call home,” she states. Washed with bleach, the imagery attests to the erasure of Kurdish suffering and persecution from official history, its culture maintained only through unofficial routes and oral history. Partially on top of the wallpaper collage, Kara presents four recent paintings. These are translations of abstract patterns from carpets woven in various different Kurdish tribes and areas. Suggestive of traditional tapestry, in which all the warp threads are hidden and the weft yarns typically discontinuous, Kara’s new series evoke firm bonds between otherwise fading roots, as well as the dissolution and recovery of memory.