Melike Kara’s (b. 1985 in Bensberg; lives and works in Cologne) paintings begin from the form of the knot and the different knot-making techniques, motifs, and patterns used by Kurdish weavers. Born to an Alevi Kurdish family, Kara has traced the ways these patterns have changed over time, borrowing from and adapting to local weaving traditions as Kurdish people migrated. She characterizes the knot as a form of abstraction, a register of the proximate cultures and hybridity tied to the Kurdish diaspora, as well as a means of expression through which Kara explores the figure and its dissolution.
Since 2014, Melike Kara has collected photographs from the Kurdish diaspora, piecing together a collective archive of Kurdish life. From this material, she creates a ground for her paintings, individually pasting each photograph to the wall and then painting over it with bleach. This process speaks to a larger tension between the purpose of an archive to preserve cultural memory, and its inability to bridge the fragmented experiences of a stateless diaspora. She explains: “During the process, it feels as if you are wandering through stories of a personal origin but also of the collective, as the work itself attempts to hold on.”
