Melike Kara: shallow lakes

From February 15 to May 12, 2024, the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt is presenting shallow lakes, an extensive, location-specific work by the Melike Kara in the exterior as well as interior space of its publicly accessible Rotunda.

Kara creates spaces for remembrance. With an examination of her family roots as a point of departure, her installations raise questions regarding identity, migration, and visibility. Taking as a basis her archive of photographs from various private sources, which has been growing continuously since 2014, the artist studies the visual culture of the Kurdish diaspora. In her exhibition at the Schirn, Kara combines photographic material with paintings that refer to patterns from traditional knotted or woven tapestries, and sculptural elements that she has developed specifically in reference to the architecture of the Rotunda.

Dr. Sebastian Baden, Director of the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, emphasizes: “Melike Kara’s installation ‘shallow lakes’ refers to the combination of everyday cultural life between home and exile. Personal photographs and motifs that bear witness to the heterogeneous history and migration of Kurds in the diaspora are subtly woven into a collective memory by the artist. She provides a place to linger in the Schirn Rotunda, a space for social memory and, in doing so, also creates a new form of visibility.”

Solidarity, spirituality and rituals, but also displacement and trauma are central themes in Melike Kara’s work, which is dedicated to preserving the culture of the Kurdish diaspora. As an artist of Kurdish-Alevi heritage herself, her work is based on an extensive collection of historical as well as contemporary photographs of intimate moments such as family photos, snapshots of meals, festivities, landscapes, living spaces, photographic portraits and documents that highlight the beauty of everyday culture.

In the Rotunda of the Schirn, Kara creates a walk-in visual archive with countless of these photographs, which she manipulates and alters, and then assembles into a collage that spans the entire space. The window front of the Rotunda is adorned with transparencies featuring larger-than-life portraits of Kurdish women from different generations: from the beginning of the last century to the present day, as a portrait gallery of female ancestors. She subjects the photographs to a material alienation process that renders their appearance wavy, discolored or faded, spreading across the large-format reproductions like a melancholy veil.

The installation furthermore includes five octagonal pavilions with illustrated fabric roofs that correspond with the specific architecture of the publicly accessible Schirn Rotunda with its eight pairs of columns.The sculptures create the impression of a garden. Floral plaster elements, rooted like flowers on the floor sculptures, add to the feeling that this is some kind of ecosystem.

On the interior walls of the Rotunda are hundreds of photographs in form of a wallpaper that Kara complements with abstract paintings. Her paintings are an artistic exploration of the diversity and transformation process of ornaments in traditional Kurdish tapestries. In this adaptation and recomposition of the motifs, the various tapestries themselves already exhibit a certain abstraction, as details have been omitted or geometries altered. They equally reflect stories of migration and the forced resettlement of various Kurdish communities.

The exhibition “Melike Kara: shallow lakes” is supported by the SCHIRN ZEITGENOSSEN with additional support by the Dr. Hans Feith und Dr. Elisabeth Feith Stiftung.

A catalog including a foreword by Sebastian Baden, Director of the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt as well as exhibition views, will be published during the course of the exhibition by DISTANZ Verlag in an German-English edition.

Director: Dr. Sebastian Baden
Press contact: Johanna Pulz (Head of Press/Public Relations): presse [​at​] schirn.de / T +49 (0) 69 29 98 82 148. Press material here.