The beauty of the roots

If painting cannot be categorised immediately, that is a good sign. Although Melike Kara knows where she comes from and where she belongs, the pictures that emerge from this conscious localisation are initially mysterious, abstract-looking explorations of surfaces. In the current works, circling conglomerations of lines and sprawling fields of colour rub wildly against each other. No one has to win here, it's more about a game, perhaps even about connecting. And if you step back a little further, everything seems to come together to form a harmonious whole.

When Melike Kara talks about her work, the term ‘beautiful’ comes up from time to time, or that something needs to be preserved, and that brings us to her Kurdish roots and the constant dialogue with this culture. Kara's grandparents immigrated to Germany in the 1970s, but it was only in their unfamiliar new surroundings that they recognised their Kurdish-Alevi origins. This could be dangerous in Turkey, at least for decades it was forbidden to even speak Kurdish.

In the German diaspora, grandmother Emine revived traditions and rituals - her father had been a shaman in a small village in eastern Anatolia. She told her children and grandchildren the stories of her old homeland, just as her ancestors had done from generation to generation.

For Melike Kara, who was born in Bensberg in 1985, Kurdish culture with its fairy tales, its spirituality and its distant magic has been a natural part of her life from an early age. Her grandmother in particular was a decisive reference person for her, which became particularly clear in Kara's highly acclaimed installation ‘shallow lakes’ at the Schirn. In February 2024, the artist created a kind of walk-in archive on several levels for the rotunda of the Frankfurter Kunsthalle. The work was based on historical and contemporary photographs, which the 39-year-old alienated, mostly bleached, to give them a uniform look. Her grandmother appears alongside other relatives, friends and a heavily pregnant Melike.

All of these photographs have been used to create an expansive collage, combined with sculptures and pavilion architecture that lead us through the various levels into a story of migration and exile. Kara's own family, with its overflowing cultural baggage, becomes a model for many of these fates, and this applies not only to the painful aspects, but also to the joyful ones.

Following solo exhibitions at the Yuz Museum Shanghai (2018), the Witte de With Centre in Rotterdam (2019) and the Kunsthalle Sankt Gallen (2023), the presentation at the Schirn was a temporary highlight in Kara's oeuvre, especially as the installation also demonstrated her versatility and the almost nonchalant merging of different genres. This initially works on a purely aesthetic level, but those who engage with the content experience an exciting retrospective in both senses of the word of a heterogeneous people who would never have given up on themselves or forgotten their cultural codes even in the face of persecution and repression.

For Melike Kara, who studied under Rosemarie Trockel at the Düsseldorf Art Academy, carpets and everything to do with them are an important stylistic device that runs through her entire oeuvre. In an intensive interplay with the architecture, 400 hand-moulded silver elements, which reproduce the modified patterns of Kurdish weavers, hung in the Aachen Haus Ludwig of the collector couple Peter and Irene Ludwig until the end of October. Modified because the forcibly resettled women have incorporated new impressions and forms into the ornamentation of their old homeland.

This process also has something to do with Kara's painting. It is based on more or less Kurdish decorative forms, which she soon allows to merge into her free gestural brushwork. New works can be seen at ART COLOGNE, where Melike Kara will be presented by Jan Kaps. Born in Düsseldorf, he founded his gallery in Cologne in 2013 at the age of just 25, which means he is still one of the youngsters in the profession. Kaps consciously represents artists of his generation who address current issues and participate in discourses in an international context. This can be loud and gaudy. Or a mixture of everything. Memory, in particular, is never one-dimensional, but rather interlinked - as with Melike Kara.