With her dynamic and densely entwined abstract gestures, Kurdish-born and German-raised artist Melike Kara has transformed the canvas into a space of both remembrance and resemblance. Projecting and transferring onto the surface a complex orchestration of psychosomatic motions between mind, body and soul, her alternately lyrical yet vigorous mark-making emerges from a direct dialogue with both her Kurdish ancestral roots and traditions and something more ineffable—something shaped by growing up far from her family’s homeland and encountering other cultures along the way.
Kurdish tapestries serve as a starting point for Kara’s gestural abstract paintings, but she freely appropriates, manipulates and reinterprets her cultural heritage, reviving it through an act of overwriting. Physically claiming possession of the canvas and those cultural references with free and intimately deep gestures, she moves beyond codified language and fixed cultural identification, exploring a transcultural and transcendental expressive universe. “I start by examining various Kurdish tapestry motifs from different regions and tribes. From this, a visual language that is rooted in the present is developed. Kurdish weaving replaces the stylistic uniformity of other traditions with a fluid and flexible approach to sourcing and creativity,” the artist tells Observer after the opening of “was uns bleibt,” her debut show with Bortolami in New York at 55 Walker.
The tapestries, Kara explains, were already the product of multiple cultural influences and aesthetic sensibilities, blending together on the same plane. “By freely borrowing and mixing motifs from all neighboring regional cultures, the weavers have created a register of Kurdish history, a visual record of its ever-changing proximity to other peoples. The reason for this may have been expulsion and resettlement, but what I’m mainly interested in are the freedoms these weavers took.”
The interplay of movements and painterly gestures, radiating from and pulling in and out of different layers, captures a delicate push and pull—between inclusion and repulsion, constraint and freedom, erasure and expression. “Within their constraints, they have managed to freely choose the patterns they wanted to create. The connections between the places they had to leave behind and where they were resettled are all embedded; I find that really fascinating,” Kara notes. She recognizes echoes of her own experience in this dynamic, confronting the fragility and looming erasure of her Kurdish heritage while working to evoke, revitalize and represent it. “I choose their patterns as a starting point for my paintings. From there, I take the freedom to transform the patterns and to create my own visual language,” she adds. “This is very important to me: to create something new and independent that is rooted in the present day.”
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The body of work Kara is debuting marks a deeply emotional and poetic exploration of origin, belonging, heritage and identity—questions that have only grown more complex since she became a mother. Yet despite the weight of these themes, she remains resolutely committed to pure abstraction. “The term ‘abstract’ is defined as ‘detached,’ but at the same time, it evokes feelings of flexibility and productivity. It has the ability to be molded, to elude conventional categorization, and to create a possibility for its own visual representation,” she says when asked about her approach. “In the context of exploring my ancestry, which, in its nature, is fragile and abstract, they provide a foundation and a medium to create something completely new. This process serves as a means of self-expression that moves on from familiar modes of expression.”
In these seemingly impenetrable and, at times, chaotic multisensory abstract works, Kara layers and accumulates marks, signs and gestures, turning the canvas into a receptacle, vessel and amplifier for psychophysical motion. “In this process, I repeatedly abstract and detach to create a new space in which a new experience reveals itself. In many ways, it resembles the act of writing, in which I reshape the narrative of my cultural heritage,” she explains.
From the rhythmic strokes of oil stick on canvas to the suspended moments of pure, spontaneous improvisation, Kara approaches painting as both a transfer and a ritual. She releases something buried deep in both her personal and collective subconscious, yet at the same time, she controls and contains the extent of its final expression. “For me, choosing a pattern is always the starting point of a self-contained ritual,” she says. “Nevertheless, after the starting point, I let go and made room for my intuition for painting to take its place as it wished.”
Just as deliberate is Kara’s use of color, which has remained remarkably consistent over the years. She has honed her palette to a deliberately restricted selection. “It has always felt right for me to focus on certain colors. The way I paint is often evident in the rapid hand movements that result in certain lines and surfaces. For me, these features receive the best attention when they are in the same color field. I allow myself to follow my intuition, which leads me to certain colors.” Pink and red—ranging from delicate to visceral, between skin and blood—recur throughout her work, as do various gradients of green and a foundational neutral silver-grey, which unifies the background as a reflective surface where she can project and reflect this ritual of self-affirmation through paint. “The paintings in red tones frequently resemble characteristics reminiscent of writing, weaving and the discovery of interconnectedness. The green tones, on the other hand, serve as a foundation, manifesting a dynamic of calm.”
Kara’s work has an intimate, diaristic quality, with the canvas serving as a surface that receives, records and preserves traces of both sensory and emotional experiences accumulated over time. Through an intuitive transcription of memory and the subconscious, she releases and refines the complex interplay between emotion and experience, layering marks onto the surface in a dynamic interweaving of forces and sensations. The result is a visual manifestation of the psyche, embodying the tension between what emerges in the foreground of our conscious self-narration and what remains hidden or repressed in the background.
For her debut show with Bortolami, Kara adds yet another emotional and memorial dimension, transforming the works into an immersive conceptual environment. Here, wallpaper installations complement and merge with the canvases, creating a dense, layered narrative tapestry. The wall installation, was uns bleibt (from which the exhibition takes its title), features a collection of archival photographs the artist has gathered from both personal and public sources—a sweeping visual archive of the Kurdish diaspora, past and present, compiled through relentless research she began in 2014.
“When I started to take a closer look at my family history, I began collecting everything I could find. I was interested in the bonds between a group of people as heterogeneous as the Kurds. That’s why I started working within a wider Kurdish network to collect photographs and other materials. Since 2014, it has been an ongoing, active process, and the archive is growing organically,” Kara says.
“My focus is on preserving the beauty of everyday life and rituals. Even though I collect from all generations, I am particularly interested in my own. There is no official archive of the Kurds, and I am aware that I can never close this gap by collecting images, but that’s not my primary concern. I am much more considering my generation’s questions: How can I approach my origins as someone with multiple affiliations? Someone who was socially conditioned elsewhere at the same time. How do you deal with an unstable identity?”
Translated into English, the title of the show means “what we have left,” reinforcing the central question of what endures and what is lost across generations removed from their parents’ or grandparents’ homeland and heritage. In exploring these themes, Kara takes a deeply personal approach, selecting—for the first time—only photographs related to motherhood, pairing them with written reflections on this condition, femininity and the shifting sense of identity in those caught between belonging and displacement. “On top of those pictures, I pasted thousands of texts on transparent tracing paper as another layer—thousands of texts and poems collected from many different sources,” she says. More intriguingly, all of these poems have been rewritten. “It was important to me to abandon a specific type of authorship so that there wouldn’t be any categorization and, at the same time, it would allow a collective pictorial atlas on the subject of motherhood to emerge. By using the tracing paper and layering different texts, a different voice, a voice of its own, is created. One that encompasses the entire current Zeitgeist.”
The interwoven strata of pink, rewritten poems cascade across the walls of the gallery, creating a dense and almost nebulous web of languages, all converging on a single existential theme. Some poems appear in German—the language in which Kara speaks, dreams and communicates with her child—others in Kurdish, the mother tongue of her maternal lineage, and still others in English, the de facto language of New York, the city hosting the exhibition. “It shows the lived reality of emigration for me. Whether voluntarily chosen or not, it always has consequences. In the form of language, certain circumstances lead to the loss of one’s mother tongue or another language becomes one’s mother tongue, generational shifts. What does it mean to preserve roots? What can be passed on, and what should be passed on? What remains lost?”
By interrogating the language we use to articulate, construct and express both our external and internal realities, Kara exposes the precarious nature of identity and heritage in a world increasingly defined by globalization. Some elements dissolve through exchange, diaspora, exile and cultural erasure, while others blend spontaneously into something new. In “was uns bleibt,” she forces us to ask: What is preserved, what is reimagined and what simply vanishes?
Nonetheless, as Kara acknowledges, the environment and intertextual atlas she created have their limitations—most notably, the presence of only a few selected Kurdish texts. “Personally, I find the Kurdish language somewhat intangible. My grandparents were afraid to speak it with my mother, so it was hardly passed on to me. Learning and speaking it now is a conscious decision; languages must be spoken to be kept alive,” she says. Instead, German is dominant. “It may sound as if something important is being lost, but I feel connected to the German language… it is natural for me to live in the language I speak to my child.” In a way, it gives her a sense of freedom. “To belong to multiple realities means it becomes possible to move on from trauma and loss in order to choose what could become part of one’s own consciously chosen identity. Many roots can remain and develop at the same time.”
By centering the exhibition on motherhood, Kara taps into a universal condition that transcends cultures and languages while simultaneously unraveling the multiplicity of meanings and emotions tied to both personal and societal roles. These identities, she notes, are fluid and constantly evolving. “Motherhood as an identity is unstable. It changes as the child continues to grow and becomes an adult or through social and other influences, and it continually changes in relation to other identities as woman, working woman, artist, etc.”
When Kara became a mother in 2022, she didn’t want to, and couldn’t, pretend that the experience hadn’t fundamentally altered her life, her work and her entire being. “I was ready to let it enter my work, and it was important to me that it would happen completely naturally. I never felt so lost and found at exactly the same time. There were things I didn’t know about—for example, who is mothering the mothers—which I would have liked to have known, but I’m not sure if it would have made a difference.”
These questions and her recently acquired identity opened an entirely new level of awareness for Kara, expanding the themes of origin, identity and belonging she had long explored in her work. “With this show, another layer of engagement came into play… another territory,” she says, and her approach to the work here involved engaging with motherhood. “There is so much content, so many ideas about how one should be, what one could do, what is best and what isn’t, what makes one stronger, and so on. To make matters worse, in our pluralistic and postmodern society, mothers are confronted with contradictory ideas and expectations regarding the upbringing of their children—it’s really impossible to please everyone.”
In the end, Kara makes no attempt to provide solutions. The texts she has collected do not prescribe answers; they simply reflect the Zeitgeist. In her multilayered installation of paintings, memories, texts and photographs, she has constructed a complex, interwoven pattern of elements that shape who we are—formed by a broader network of relationships, exchanges and cultural entanglements. Identity, as she manifests it, is not a fixed concept but an ever-shifting process, an intricate fabric of experiences and stories that we continuously weave together. The final composition may look entirely different from where we began, but that does not make it any less beautiful. “Primarily, for me, the work shows what remains for us and that we are all in it together, us mothers,” she concludes. “What remains for us is perhaps this: maybe there is space to find our own way, the freedom to create our own models and follow our own choices.”
Melike Kara’s “was uns bleibt” is on view at Bortolami Gallery in the 55 Walker Street Space through February 15, 2025.
