Melike
Kara

Melike Kara, born in 1985, lives and works in Cologne (Germany). Although the Kurdish-German artist’s primary medium is painting, she favors cross-media arrangements of works, incorporating the architecture of the space and responding to it with videos, sculptures and installations. Kara’s entire body of work draws on traditional Kurdish patterns and designs, blurring the line between abstraction and figuration and weaving together personal narratives, traditions and rituals. Here and there recognizable forms can be made out, some of them reminiscent of limbs, hybrids between stable bodies and dissolution. Her works are then both symbols of an ancient culture and a statement against the fading of the past in our present. This also speaks of her interest in the notion of identity as something embodied and in constant movement. 

She is currently represented by the German gallery Jan Kaps.