Kunsthaus Hamburg

In this solo exhibition, Melike Kara grapples with questions of identity, memory, and transformation. The exhibition’s origins lie in the artist’s intensive engagement with her Kurdish heritage, which in recent years she has researched, archived, and explored through her art practice. One of the exhibition’s aims is to visually convey the beauty of Kurdish traditions – a beauty that persists despite pain and persecution.

The installation developed specially for the Kunsthaus Hamburg marks a shift in Kara’s output: instead of embodying identity, she questions how it can be integrated – or perhaps even dismantled. What remains when the stories we tell ourselves about origin and belonging retreat into the background? What quality of awareness becomes possible when we are able to encounter each other beyond the bounds of cultural attribution? 
At Kunsthaus Hamburg, Kara translates her personal engagement with these issues into a large-scale installation. Visitors enter a garden in which the past, impermanence, and the opportunity to start afresh all intermingle. A photographic archive is burnt to ash and integrated into the installation. Paintings are incorporated into the floor and the walls and the space is strewn with images made with coffee grounds. In some places, plants can be found growing. Water streams from the walls, flows over paintings, and collects in pools or small puddles – sometimes clear, sometimes cloudy. Thus emerges a fragile, living landscape, one that simultaneously tells a story of loss and of the possibility of a new beginning. Amidst fire and water, remembrance and dissolution, Kara invites visitors to question their own conceptions of identity – and to seek out the shared experiences that transcend cultural specificity. In the process, the installation creates a space that not only speaks of individual memory, but also asks what forms of togetherness become possible when identity is understood as something in motion – towards an open experience of presence.

This exhibition is curated by Anna Nowak.