Melike Kara (German, born in 1985) engages in a broad variety of mediums, including painting, sculpture, photography, and installation. She is of Kurdish-Alevi descent, and her oeuvre revolves around the concepts of origin, displacement, community, and marginalization, which form the central themes related to migration.

Kara started her artistic practice with investigations into her own family roots, and of the traditions and rituals, especially among Kurdish women, in the mountains of Anatolia. She has been collecting traces of this culture since 2014 and created an extensive photographic archive, which makes her a kind of archivist of the culture of her inherited community. Kara’s painterly imagery has changed over time: her reduced figurative approach developed into gestural abstraction, always gaining inspiration, however, from Kurdish sources or immigrants’ issues. Recently, she used the patterns of traditional knotted and woven Kurdish tapestries as the basis of a body of abstract gestural paintings.

Mosquito (2018) is an early, enigmatic portrait of a group of tightly entwined people rendered in a limited color palette of black, white, gray, and pink. The thick contours are painted with an oil stick, and their cropped fragmented bodies completed with acrylic paint. The five characters communicate with each other by whispering and by making gestures, as if preparing for action in an undefined place and time. The social interaction between the figures that lack a specific identity focuses according to the artist on the question of belonging, as if they were asking questions about where identity begins and how much one’s background influences their present life.