Memory in Flux

With her exhibition Whispers, at the Kunsthaus Hamburg, Melike Kara is breaking new ground. Situated at the intersection of preservation and dissolution, her artistic practice unfolds in a way that understands memory not as something that fixes things in place but rather as a process of letting go: something relational, sensual, and in constant motion. In this interview with curator Anna Nowak, she discusses her recent artistic development, the fragile materiality of images, and the motif of the garden. 
 
Anna Nowak: Your photographic archive – compiled of personal photographs and publicly available images gathered since 2014 – plays a central role in your practice. For your exhibition Whispers at the Kunsthaus Hamburg, you are burning parts of this archive for the first time. What does this gesture mean to you?
 
Melike Kara: My archive has long served me as a kind of stabilizing space – as a collection, a space for memory, an attempt to safeguard something that otherwise eludes us. The photographs are imbued with stories, affiliations, fragments of biography, and collective memory. The decision to set fire to parts of this archive, therefore, represents not an act of destruction but an intentional transformation. The image is no longer displayed as a legible surface; instead, it is converted into a purely material state – ash, dust, sediment. It sheds its narrative clarity to become part of a spatial process. What interests me is precisely the transition from image to material. A photograph can be read as evidence, as a document, or a surface for identification Ash, on the other hand, is clearly incapable of performing such a function; it is fragile, shiftable, unstable. This instability generates a different kind of presence – one which, rather than asserting itself, remains ambiguous.
 
Anna Nowak: An archive preserves, while fire seemingly destroys. Yet you emphasise that you are not concerned with erasure. What role does this apparent tension play in your work?
 
Melike Kara: The archive preserves through order and fixing things in place. It records, categorises, and ensures continuity. Fire seems to erase. For me, the work resides not in this contrast, but in a process in between. Burning is not a form of destruction, but an alteration of form. History doesn’t cease to exist; it alters its aggregate state. Although it becomes less tangible, less distinct, it is no less present. A focus on stabilisation was a necessary phase of my work. It was a response to real threats to history and language. Now, in this context, transformation doesn’t imply discontinuity, but rather a continuation of responsibility – without the necessity of holding on to everything.
 
Anna Nowak: In previous exhibitions, such as Emine’s Garden at the Kunsthalle St. Gallen and shallow lakes at the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, you introduced the garden as an underlying motif in your work. How do you carry this level of meaning forward spatially in Whispers?
 
Melike Kara: In earlier works, the theme of the garden was more directly linked to a search for origin and identity. In Whispers, a shift in perspective has occurred. The garden no longer appears as a motif being depicted, but rather as a state that can be entered. Water flows, accumulates, stands still. Seedlings grow under conditions that are not entirely controllable. Fabrics, ashes, and coffee grounds cover surfaces, forming transitional realms. Rather than giving the impression of an orderly system, the space appears as a relational structure. There is no centre, no clear line of sight, no hierarchy. Here, the garden is not conceived as an idyll or a model of order, but as a field in which growth and decay, collection and dissolution are allowed to exist simultaneously.
 
Anna Nowak: Can a garden serve as an alternative model for memory than an archive? And, if so, what changes does this bring about in terms of history and sense of belonging?
 
Melike Kara: An archive preserves by fixing things in place. It creates inventories and continuities. A garden, on the other hand, functions as a result of care, repetition, the seasons, and perpetual change. In a garden, memory is not an inventory, but a process. It grows, is pruned, withers, and returns. This also alters our conception of belonging. It becomes less about possession or definition and more about relationship and care. In a garden, history doesn’t endure as a document, but as a practice.
 
Anna Nowak: Inquiries into Kurdish identity have often played a significant role in your work. How does your approach in Whispers differ from your earlier works in this respect?
 
Melike Kara: Earlier works were strongly influenced by a desire to stabilise and visualise identity. Whispers follows a different inner trajectory. I am interested in what happens when identification is no longer forced. When attributions, narratives, and self-definitions can recede into the background for a moment. The space offered by the installation enables the kind of perception that doesn’t immediately translate experience into meaning or belonging. At the same time, the question remains: does identification actually disappear – or does it reappear again and again? In this regard, the work doesn’t attempt to provide a conclusive answer, but rather to create a space in which this coming and going becomes visible. Instead of a new definition, what remains is an open state of consciousness.
 
Anna Nowak: Your work keeps shifting between individual biography and collective presence. What interests you about the tension between these two things, and how does it manifest in the Hamburg installation?
 
Melike Kara: I am interested in how personal memories have always been embedded in larger contexts without completely dissolving into them. The burnt photographs retain traces of the personal, yet also lose their clear legibility. The ritual of reading coffee grounds – whose original interpretative direction I deliberately reverse – is a reference to collective practices of meaning-making. By depriving the coffee grounds of their interpretative function, they remain mere material – traces, surfaces, sediments. Meaning may arise and then vanish again. In this way, the tension between the individual and the collective is not explained, but experienced.
 
Anna Nowak: While the photographs convey tangible, identifiable stories, your paintings are intuitive and abstract. What role does painting hold for you in the installation as a kind of interface between image, material, and dissolution?
 
Melike Kara: For me, painting is a space where form can emerge and simultaneously withdraw itself. While photography conveys something concrete, painting moves in a realm between visibility and dissolution. In Whispers, it is not isolated, but enters into a relationship with water, ash, and coffee grounds. It connects the legible with the illegible, thus keeping the space between image and material open.
 
Anna Nowak: A garden knows no national borders, instead following other rhythms – care, growth, decay. Is the shift from an archive to a garden also a departure from territorial thinking and fixed ideas of belonging?
 
Melike Kara: An archive is often associated with collection, possession, and demarcation. A garden, on the other hand, functions relationally – through cyclical processes. For me, the transition from the archive to the garden represents a shift from fixed notions of belonging towards conceptions of relationships as processes. It is connection, not territory, that becomes central.
 
Anna Nowak: The installation appeals to all our senses. Upon entering, one can hear water, smell coffee grounds, and see growth and decay. What role does this sensoriality play? And what do you hope visitors will take away from Whispers?
 
Melike Kara: The sensorial aspect is vital. It creates a physical experience that cannot be fully translated into language. I encourage visitors to focus not only on interpretation, but also on perception. Perhaps they will end up with less of a clear message and more of a changed awareness – of the fragile, the quiet, and the space that remains when one doesn’t have to immediately identify something. Perhaps they will linger with a sound, a smell, or a slowly changing surface a moment longer. A situation may arise in which they don’t have to immediately decide what something means. Whispers is not a space meant to provide answers. It is a space where something can emerge, transform, and disappear again – like a thought that comes and goes without being held on to. What remains is a sensitivity to transitions: between visibility and dissolution, between proximity and distance, between what we can name and what is simply there.