Opening Hours: Wednesday – Saturday 12-6pm

Arcadia Missa is excited to announce the first solo exhibition in London by artist Melike Kara, My Beloved Wild Valley.

I hear the tongues
Of a whole
generation
Made of wild flowers

The paradox of identity is that it must be self-assertive, part of one’s claim for subjecthood, yet it must also evade a myopic lens, a singular identity, and demand that each in fact contains multiplicities. Evasion is abundant in the figures of Kara’s paintings. We read them as human, but obvious indications of identity are pretty much illegible. Their presence, their characters, are created through the interaction they have with one another on the canvas and the placing of them within contexts, signifiers, or even areas of negative space: what we weigh.

For the exhibition My Beloved Wild Valley the figures are encircled with signifiers of place, a move towards perhaps locating their identities as connected to the heritage of the artist herself and outside of being read simplistically through the body. These figures are read through their landscapes and histories. Background patterns reference tapestries of flowers, a sun sets behind the tangle of bodies in a hot place. These markers of site and culture speak of history as identity, a more complex matrix from which to map a sense of self, one made from ghosts.