Melike Kara

Melike Kara turns dozens of pictures from her Kurdish family album into a sprawling floor installation in “Emine’s Garden,” named in honor of the artist’s grandmother. Spanning three exhibition spaces in the Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen, the work takes the idea of the garden literally. Overgrown with plaster flowers and enigmatic ornaments inspired by Kurdish weaving, the images coalesce into variegated patterns beneath our feet, forming a secluded sanctuary that nevertheless invites the visitor to participate by roaming another person’s recollections.

Personal photographs capturing relatives on various occasions, passport images, and shots of Kurdistan’s vastness, all in black and white, are all covered with skins of white paint that veil, to varying degrees, the imagery below. Interpolated throughout are five abstract paintings in oil stick and acrylic, which also make reference to this region by alluding to tribes or places such as girdi tribe / tij, kars / goyan, or qasha’i / tij (all works 2023).

In an era in which questions of origin, heritage, and belonging are almost reflexively equated with complication and contestation, Kara makes identity into a garden to stroll through and enjoy. There are memories wherever one looks, yet these seemingly countless fragments of a life do not sum up to a complete or coherent picture. The collected images reveal something different from each angle—sometimes demonstratively leading to a dead end, hidden under a mantle of obliviscence.