Melike Kara is a contemporary artist born in 1985 in Bensberg, Germany, and currently based in Cologne. Working with painting, installation, and archival materials, Kara's artistic practice centers on questions of Kurdish heritage, personal and collective memory, history, belonging, biography, and identity. Drawing on archival research developed over many years, she transforms these materials into a pictorial language and is particularly interested in how the past and cultural memory can be reconstructed through abstraction.
Kara's paintings are primarily created on canvas using materials such as oil pastel and acrylic. Rather than relying on a clearly defined figurative narrative, she employs a more open-ended visual language composed of lines, colours, marks, and forms. Alongside painting, she also produces installations incorporating archival photographs, prints, textiles, stone, wood, and various other materials. Rather than directly representing the relationship between personal and collective history, this approach enables her to reconsider memory and the traces of the past through abstract and sensory forms.
Kara's international exhibition history has expanded significantly since the late 2010s. In 2018, she participated in A Taste of Parsley at Yuz Museum, Shanghai, and Bamboo Bar, At the Edge of the Universe at Dortmunder Kunstverein. In 2019, she presented her work at the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam. In 2020, she took part in Risquons-Tout at WIELS Contemporary Art Centre in Brussels and No Friends but the Mountains at Kunstverein Göttingen.
In 2021, Kara held her solo exhibition Nothing Is Yours. Everything Is You at Kölnischer Kunstverein. In 2022, she opened the exhibition landing softly at Neue Galerie Gladbeck and participated in the 58th Carnegie International organised by the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh. The latter became one of the important milestones that increased her visibility within the international art world.
In 2023, she presented her solo exhibition Emine's Garden at Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen. In the same year, she presented the work tij as part of Art Basel Parcours and participated in the exhibition Brave New World at Museum de Fundatie in Zwolle. The year 2024 marked a period of major institutional presentations. Her solo exhibition shallow lakes was presented at SCHIRN Kunsthalle Frankfurt, alongside another solo presentation at the Peter und Irene Ludwig Stiftung in Aachen and the exhibition chanting at Jan Kaps in Cologne. In shallow lakes, she brought together new paintings alongside works informed by her research into Kurdish geography and history.
In 2025, she held the solo exhibition was uns bleibt at Bortolami Gallery in New York. In 2026, her solo exhibition Whispers opened at Kunsthaus Hamburg. The same year, she also presented Everything Knows at François Ghebaly in Los Angeles.
Rather than directly representing Kurdish history and memory, Melike Kara's practice seeks to rethink them through archives, abstraction, and painterly form. The relationship she establishes between the personal archive and collective history does not treat Kurdish identity as a fixed field of representation; instead, it opens the traces of the past to processes of transformation and reinterpretation. In this respect, Kara is among the artists who engage in a distinctive way with the relationship between archive, memory, and abstraction within contemporary discussions surrounding Kurdish art in Europe.
