The Politics of Whispering

Water seeps from the walls and trickles into the room. It flows through paintings, reliefs, ornaments, and photographic collages on the walls and the floor. Coffee grounds, ash, and plaster mix themselves into the flow of water, colouring it, and collecting in puddles. Plants sprout and grow on patches of fabric and different parts of the room. Everything intertwines in pulsating fields to form a fragile garden landscape. Melike Kara’s expansive installation Whispers transforms the Kunsthaus Hamburg into a vibrant microcosm that allows us to move among living layers and surfaces. As we pause to engage with the visual experience, a rhythmic space emerges in the midst of this garden. Like in a woven carpet, the various elements intertwine, repeat, and overlap one another, though without following a fixed order or imposing a spatial hierarchy.

For this exhibition, Kara has burned parts of her own personal photographic archive. The charred remnants of these images appear as brittle, porous surfaces, streaked with fine cracks and with some retaining fragments of the original images. Some of the works are framed, while others are placed on the floor or hung unadorned on the walls. Anything encased in a frame nevertheless remains in motion – in a material state suspended between image and remnant, legibility and dissolution. The surfaces appear as though they could, at any moment, undergo further change. The frames thus hold the exhibition space in place – not the material. The remnants retain their ephemeral quality and interact with other elements of the installation.

As part of an engagement with her Kurdish roots, since 2014 Kara has been compiling photographs from family archives, the lives of friends, and from widely available found footage into a visual archive. Rather than functioning as a closed system, her archive is conceived of as an open structure that is uninterested in replicating the strictures of a state-sanctioned site of memory. In diasporic contexts – where archives are often completely missing or have been destroyed – collecting becomes a political act. It creates visibility and reveals layers of meaning where structural invisibility otherwise prevails. Kara’s practice of collecting is therefore not a neutral act, but a deliberate rejection of disappearance and silence. Where institutional preservation of cultural memory is lacking, Kara’s archive becomes a living and dynamic field of memory that raises more questions than it provides answers. Here, images enter into dialogue with orally transmitted traditions and rituals. In this approach to preservation, knowledge is passed on rather than monumentalized.

Kara has also previously incorporated parts of her archive into expansive, site-specific installations. Photographic images were transferred onto various materials, enlarged, bleached, and combined with ornaments, fabrics, and sculptural elements that referenced Kurdish traditions. In these works, the images did not exist as independent documents, but as elements of a spatial structure. Meaning was not created through explanation, but rather through interactive configurations of interweaving personal and collective memories. Here, identity does not appear as a fixed category, but as something that results from a process of juxtaposition. Origin is not represented; instead, it is negotiated spatially, through superimposition, repetition, and displacement. This practice is reminiscent of Aby Warburg’s Bilderatlas Mnemosyne: instead of a linear narrative, the collection of materials establishes an open plane of thought whereupon affinities and tensions between images become apparent. But even this sort of conceptual space is not free of preconceptions. For philosopher Jacques Derrida, the archive is not a neutral storehouse of information, but rather an apparatus of power that determines what is remembered and what is rendered visible. Against the backdrop of a historical context in which Kurdish identity is being marginalised, Kara deliberately intervenes in this logic. For her, the archive does not represent a stable repository of truth, but rather a fluid space of narrative. With Whispers, Kara’s archival practice is brought to a tangible point of culmination. For the first time, she partially surrenders her archive to fire – not out of a desire for destruction, but as a gesture of transformation. Through the act of burning, the photographic image undergoes a transition from a legible surface to a more fragile material state.

What happens when an archive is burned? In Georges Didi-Huberman and Knut Ebeling’s Das Archiv brennt (The Archive is Burning), the archive is described as a zone of political conflict – a site where notions of preservation and loss are negotiated. In Kara’s work, the process of burning leads to a further opening of the archive – in the form of traces: delicate, accessible, fragmentary. Suspended in the space between visibility and disappearance, images conjured from ashes defy the archive’s claim to totality by resisting appropriation and musealisation. Their whispering presence embodies a different kind of knowledge, one that is intuitive and transgenerational. The archive thus becomes a vulnerable yet resistant space of memory.

Burning dispels a certain conception of photographs: the idea that they must commemorate, bear witness, or represent. This “must” is nullified. This is not a kind of loss resulting from external violence, destruction by the state, or historical coincidence. The act of burning constitutes an artistic decision. The selection of the images to be burned occurs as part of a process rather than according to fixed categories. Kara works with reproductions, copies, and widely circulated photographs – with images whose materiality has already undergone a shift. The focus here lies not on the singular original, but on the image in circulation. By committing these images to the flames, she subverts the classic archival logic of accumulation, permanence, and preservation. The conservational authority is replaced by a condition in which imagery is not stored but set in motion. Whispers is thus a quiet but decisive act of resistance to hegemonic orders of knowledge, colonial regimes of the gaze, and the perception of history as a fixed entity. Instead of speaking in clear sentences, these charred and ashen images are whispering – like memories, rituals, and songs that can only be heard from up close. Through the act of burning portions of her archive, Kara creates a resonant poetic space in which transience does not mean loss; instead, it opens up possibilities for a different kind of memory.

If we consider the photograph as a trace of light – an indexical imprint of a reality – its ashes, which serve as its medial afterlife, become a trace of the trace. As a material remnant, the photographs’ charred remains retain the event of their burning; without necessarily referring to what is depicted, they tell of the change in the very nature of the image itself. In debates on image theory, such traces become relevant whenever archives are destroyed and visibility is threatened. In Kara’s work, however, the photographic remnants do not primarily mark loss. Instead, they signify transition: the continued effect of an image beyond its photographic constitution. Rather than representing something particular, the ashes become the carrier of a state of being. Kara does not completely erase the images; fragments of pictures remain in the porous surface of their physical remains. Although they are no longer legible as concrete documentation, nor have they entirely vanished. Kara thus highlights her interest in the tension between visibility and dissolution. The burned remnants are not presented as being fixed but are instead placed in relation to other elements in the surrounding environment.

Alongside the photographic remains, coffee grounds appear as another sediment. They too are traces – not of destructive acts, but of a ritual. In Kurdish tradition, coffee grounds are read collectively. Kara, however, is less interested in interpretation than in the expectation of meaning. For her, the decisive moment is the one when a form appears in the residue only to disappear again. While the ashes emerge from the image and render visible its material transformation, the coffee grounds remain organic, transient, colouring, without taking on a specific role. She translates into the exhibition space something that is never archived in the family context, but is passed on in everyday life. Ash and coffee grounds represent different forms of memory: the visual archive and oral tradition. In Kara’s garden, ash, coffee grounds, water, and fabric all coalesce – and seedlings grow in their midst.

They show the process of becoming under the conditions one is presented with. Their growth already indicates a transition towards decay. Memory appears here as something that is tended to – without, however, being subjected to control. Time manifests not as an indicator of progress, but as a moment of attention and care. In this context, beauty is not the result of aesthetic harmony; rather, it denotes a state in which fragility becomes visible and persists despite fragmentation. In the context of the Kurdish diaspora, this signifies much more than an aesthetic choice. Archives are often read in terms of loss or violence; photographs serve as evidence of belonging. Kara, in contrast, releases the image from the weight of this expectation. Rather than indicating a lack of visibility, diaspora here conveys a sense of fluidity and withdrawal – an existence between one form and another, between identification and letting go.

What remains is association. Whereas garden landscapes featured in Kara’s previous works were still imbued with a longing to establish identity, in Whispers this impulse has undergone a shift. The focus is less on identification and more on the space in between. In this work, the garden becomes a state of mind that one can enter, a posture one can adopt. There is no structuring centre to be found here. Instead, we encounter a processual circulation of material, memory, and association. Movement and collection coincide. Traces, voices, and fragments overlap as if threads in a woven carpet – all are intertwined. We simply venture deeper into this garden-like space. It is no longer about recognising what we see, but about the act of seeing itself. As we continue to let go, we may hear the whispers of multiple voices beneath the sound of splashing water. Perhaps, in this subtle yet persistent echo – in this whispering – lies a form of resistance that does not need to be loud to be effective.