Melike Kara: Whispers

For her solo exhibition at the Kunsthaus Hamburg, the artist Melike Kara has burned parts of her photographic archive and incorporated the remains into a large-scale installation. Conceived as a garden landscape, Whispers focuses on the act of letting go and the sensory experience of eternal transformation.

Melike Kara’s artistic practice has long been situated at the intersection of personal archival work, collective historiography and painterly translation. In her new installation, created specifically for the Kunsthaus Hamburg, she radicalizes this approach by burning photographs from her own archive for the first time. What remains are traces: fragments, condensations, material relics of images eluding fixation. Thus, she follows an expanded understanding of photography: not as a static image or repository of the past, but as a process—as a circulating and evolving medium of memory, identity and transformation.

Starting point for Whispers is Melike Kara’s intensive engagement with her Kurdish heritage, which she has been researching, archiving and artistically processing for many years. In this inquiry, she deliberately focused her gaze on the beauty of Kurdish traditions—beyond pain, persecution and political attribution. The exhibition marks an unprecedented shift: rather than representing a sense of identity, the artist asks how it can be embedded or even dissolved.

Melike Kara translates this exploration into a garden, laid out in the exhibition hall of the Kunsthaus. Fragments and ashes from the photographs are incorporated into the installation. A frieze made from coffee grounds permeates the space like a sedimented trace of the past. Water oozes out of the walls and collects in basins. In some places, plants are floating. As a result, a vibrant yet fragile environment emerges, oscillating between evolution and disintegration. Drawing on the ritual of reading coffee grounds as practised by her grandmother, Melike Kara lets the material's socially and culturally embedded meanings dissolve. Coffee no longer serves as a means of divination. Rather, it is part of a process that invites questions about presence, perception and identification.

Through the interplay of water and fire, continuity and change, Whispers opens up a sensory space of experience which places individual memory in a broader context. The installation asks less about identity than about shared conditions—and the possibility of coexistence beyond cultural attributions. Particularly in light of current political and social turmoil, consciously breaking free from fixed images becomes a liberating act of self-reflection and self-empowerment.

The exhibition is part of the 9th Triennial of Photography Hamburg 2026, entitled Alliance, Infinity, Love—In the Face of the Other. Considered in this context, Melike Kara’s installation underscores the central themes of the festival concept: Alliance as a fluid, ever-evolving relationship between images, bodies and stories; Infinity as an ongoing process of memory and change; and Love as a delicate form of closeness and belonging that requires care and openness.

Curated by Anna Nowak. Kindly supported by the Ministry of Culture and Media Hamburg and Claussen-Simon-Stiftung.