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Painter Melike Kara Brings the Spirit World to her exhibition

Melike Kara’s bold, sumptuous paintings resist easy interpretation. Androgynous figures rendered in hues of blue, green, or purple dance across the canvas, resembling masked commandos or primitive tribespeople, with indeterminate gender, ethnicity, and social status. “They are equally everyone and everywhere,” the young talent says from her light-filled studio in Cologne, Germany, where she lives and works. “What they do have is a body, a heart: They feel love, joy, fear, anger. The canvases capture that.”
Born and raised in Germany, Kara is also part of a Kurdish Alevi family that was forced to flee Turkey due to persecution—a theme that Kara has only recently started to explore more actively in her art. “In the beginning, it was definitely a deliberate decision to leave it all behind, the idea of belonging to my identity and the political tensions of being both German and Kurdish. I wanted to see what was left,” she says. In a show this past winter at her Cologne gallery, Jan Kaps, she displayed a highly personal video, Emine (2018), which depicts her aging grandmother, the only one in her family who still speaks their native Zazaki language. “There’s an inner dialogue going on,” says Kara. “What does it mean to have Kurdish roots? I don’t have an answer yet.”
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