The Brooklyn Rail

As opposed to a memory palace, Melike Kara has planted a memory garden on the floor of the gallery at the Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen. The composition of Emine’s Garden (named after her grandmother) is ambiguous: five large paintings on canvas lie flat, slightly raised from the floor, while laminated directly to that floor is a labyrinth of grainy black-and-white family photographs. Skeins of decoration—borders and florets of colored plaster applied like icing via a piping bag—augment the photographs. The eye flickers between the figures in the images and the pure abstraction of the paintings, which consist of bright knots of pastel pink, yellow, and blue in heavy solid brushstrokes on a silvery background. Kara has manifested the cultural energy of the centerpiece of a Kurdish home: the carpet, which many Middle Eastern cultures see as a domestic centering or anchoring agent. Making a floor covering from her own family snapshots, along with her own decorative caprices, the visual movement across the tapestry, which we usually accomplish with our eyes, becomes a physical journey through the gallery. The straight edges of both the paintings and photos inscribe a regular geometry to the space while presenting diametrically opposed ideas of imagery. The three-dimensional interstitial decoration, meandering through the gallery, further acts as a transgressive presence, questioning how we register familiar forms versus imaginary ones. Is a tapestry or carpet patterned with symbols or simplified images a work of abstraction, or something else? Kara, by folding into her installation the idea of personal memory, decoration, and then a painterly Abstract Expressionist sensibility, seeks to slice apart our varying degrees of cognition and recognizability.

Are too many variables being juggled here? The artist seeks to destabilize a time-honored assumption about viewing art: that paintings belong anywhere but on the floor. The gallery here is less a presentation than a walked experience. The artist returns frequently to her garden metaphor, and this lends a narrative to the excursion through her installation. Like follies in a park, the paintings float in the space as sights along the path, or more interestingly, as obstacles demanding that we turn back and find an alternative. The painting qasha’i / tij (all paintings are 2023), slightly wider than a square, sits in a small area of bare floor. We cannot tell the orientation of the work, but via the paths that allow us to approach it, we can sense the vertical versus horizontal axis, much like a rug or tapestry. The lightly colored brushstrokes emerging like stray threads from the compacted wads of color, viewed from above, reference children’s chalk marks on an asphalt playground. The gray background has been imprinted with decorative patterns found in carpets and various woven fabrics. In the painting kars / tij, light yellow paint and gray wash flow around the background patterns, giving them a three dimensionality they would never achieve in their life on a carpet.

The black-and-white images have been wheat-pasted to the floor, at times being obscured with the gooey brackish brushstrokes of their application. There are passport photos, groups of faces, veiled women in traditional Kurdish garb, and family portraits, some more and some less formal. Glued to the floor they look like a ghostly cross between posters glued to construction site scaffolding and newspaper clippings, and they track various moments in an individual’s or a family’s life. In a moment of wit, the painting dazkiri / tij mostly obscures the photo it rests atop, except for two pairs of feet sticking out below the canvas, Wicked Witch of the East-style. The photos do not form a pattern, but the alternation of black and white approximates one when viewed across the expanse of the gallery’s three large rooms.

The central and narrowest of the three rooms of Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen is given over entirely to the laminated photos and applied decoration; there is no supine painting here. A crooked path runs its length and a large window on one end faces a narrow blank wall on the other. The faded family images are almost completely compromised by the piped decoration. Neatly laid, plaster scarlet X-forms sweep across the floor (stopping on either side of the path), and banks of accreted plaster florets in a variety of sizes and shades of red and pink are piled high adjacent to the more regular design, competing with the tufts of real grass and turf in the outdoor space viewed through the window. The three-room odyssey is an ode to the institution of the carpet/tapestry—Kara has deconstructed it on a literal level, uncoupling the decoration from the geometric format. Emine’s Garden is an earthly stand-in for the gardens of paradise often depicted in carpets, and the imagery is one of self-exploration for the artist and discovery for the viewer.