PRESENTATION:Melike Kara=Whispers

Melike Kara is a contemporary German artist of Kurdish-Alevi heritage, born in 1985 in Bensberg near Cologne, Germany. Working across painting, installation, sculpture, photography, video, and archival collage, her practice explores themes of memory, migration, cultural identity, and the Kurdish diaspora. Central to her work is the relationship between preservation and transformation—how traditions are maintained, altered, or lost across generations and geographical boundaries.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Kunsthaus Hamburg Archive

Raised in Germany within a family originating from the Kurdish region of Dersim in eastern Turkey, Kara draws extensively on family histories, oral traditions, rituals, and cultural knowledge passed down through her grandmother and previous generations. Her work frequently examines the fate of cultural memory in contexts of displacement, assimilation, and political repression.

For her solo exhibition “Whispers” at Kunsthaus Hamburg, presented as part of the 9th Triennial of Photography Hamburg, Kara transforms elements of her personal photographic archive by burning them and incorporating their remains into a large-scale installation. Conceived as a garden-like landscape, Whispers reflects on acts of release and the sensory experience of perpetual transformation.

For many years, Kara’s artistic practice has occupied the intersection of personal archives, collective historiography, and painterly interpretation. In Whispers, she pushes this approach further by burning photographs from her own archive for the first time, reducing them to ash. What remains are traces—fragments, residues, and material echoes of images that resist permanence. Through this gesture, Kara expands the notion of photography beyond a fixed image or repository of the past, presenting it instead as an evolving process through which memory, identity, and transformation continuously circulate.

The exhibition emerges from Kara’s long-term engagement with her Kurdish heritage, which she has researched, archived, and reimagined throughout her career. Rather than focusing on narratives of suffering, persecution, or political categorization, she turns her attention to the beauty and vitality of Kurdish traditions. “Whispers” marks a significant shift in this exploration: instead of asking how identity can be represented, Kara investigates how it can be embedded, dispersed, or even dissolved.

“Whispers”  conceives photography not as a static image, but as a circulating, ever-changing medium of memory, identity and transformation. For the Kunsthaus Hamburg, the artist creates a large-scale installation in which, for the first time, she burns photographs from her own archive and, once turned into ash, integrates them into the space. What remains are traces – fragments of images eluding fixation.

This inquiry takes shape within a garden constructed inside the Kunsthaus exhibition hall. Ashes from the burned photographs are integrated into the installation, while a frieze of coffee grounds runs through the space like a sedimented record of the past. Plants emerge from the environment, and water seeps from the walls into shallow basins, creating a living yet fragile ecosystem that oscillates between growth and decay.

Drawing on the practice of coffee-ground reading once performed by her grandmother, Kara detaches the material from its traditional divinatory function. Coffee becomes part of a broader process that raises questions about presence, perception, and belonging. Through the interplay of fire and water, continuity and change, “Whispers” creates a sensory environment that situates individual memory within wider shared experiences. The installation shifts attention away from fixed notions of identity toward common conditions of existence and the possibility of coexistence beyond cultural classifications. In a period marked by social and political uncertainty, this deliberate release from predetermined images becomes an act of reflection, agency, and renewal.

Within the framework of the Triennial of Photography’s theme, “Alliance, Infinity, Love – In the Face of the Other”, Kara’s exhibition resonates strongly with the festival’s central concerns. Alliance appears as a fluid relationship between images, bodies, and narratives; Infinity as the ongoing, unresolved process of memory and transformation; and Love as a fragile yet essential form of closeness, care, and belonging.

Photo: Melike Kara, Whispers, Installation view, Kunsthaus Hamburg-Hamburg, 2026, Photo: Jaewong Kim, Courtesy the artist and Kunsthaus Hamburg

Info: Curator: Anna Nowak, Kunsthaus Hamburg, Klosterwall 15, Hamburg, Germany, Duration: 5/6-23/8/2026, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 11:00-18:00, https://kunsthaushamburg.de/