The Wild Thing Rides Again | MANAL KARA

Kara’s multivalent practice spans poetry, sculpture, painting, video, and installation. As a self-taught artist, their work eschews art-historical context in favor of cues from the world around them: the forest, fungal architectures, feats of vernacular engineering witnessed in their home country of Morocco, waste spaces, their own third culture and diasporic experience, as well as their excursions into ecology, physics, philosophy, literature, topology, and other fields of inquiry. 

Kara conjures through their work an aesthetic language of epistemological decolonization, which challenges the hierarchies of inside and outside, order and chaos, mind and matter. Their sculptures are amalgamations of various materials: aluminum, steel, vines, shrubs, mirrors, switches, toys, rusty nails, cicadas and their molt, a gourd, a skull, a grenade. In Nerve Center, cicadas operate switches in a mirrored room inside of a gourd, a scene which Kara describes as when the alien overlords step out for the evening and leave the teenagers in charge of running the simulation. The hollowed fruit becomes a head, challenging reductionist, colonial narratives of autonomy and individualism by asking who is really in the driver’s seat of this meat machine I call myself?, a sentiment reprised in Bacteriophage, a goofy, cartoonish representation of one of the most abundant entities in the biosphere.

In Caterpillar, Two-headed Dog, and Hobby Horse, all sculptures with reflective metal exteriors, Kara imagines bodies as living assemblages, which question the seat of consciousness while challenging the binary categories of living and non-living matter: “I’m not interested in merely controverting the tired dichotomies of nature/artifice, organic/synthetic, human/nonhuman; I’m more interested in working with the fertile ground inside or of their elisions—another way to say this is I’m interested in prepositions, not nouns or verbs.” Three collages, Door #1, #2, and #3, offer a psychedelic reprieve-cum-reverie, a reminder that we are each-and-all entangled in the vast weirdness of the universe, in the fabric of spacetime woven by wormholes.

It’s said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. The Wild Thing Rides Again invites us to feel what might come after: poetic and political; post-apocalyptic and full of hope; scientific and chaotic; mystical and material. Our world is overflowing with ghosts, aliens, and consciousness: “a cavalcade of ancestors poised over our shoulders”; Kara’s sculptures and collages reframe how we see and approach the possible.

Artist Bio:

Manal Kara is a first generation Moroccan-American self-taught artist and poet based between Gary, IN and Ridgewood, NY. Their multivalent practice spans sculpture, painting, photography, installation, video, and text, using a biosemiotic framework and indigenous epistemologies to engage issues of diasporic experience and the mechanics of power across all species. Recent solo exhibitions include Syntax-Semantics Interface, M. LeBlanc, Chicago (2024); Sacred Topologies, Deli Gallery, NYC (2023); Hypothèses, Pangée, Montréal (2022); and Conjectures, Shulamit Nazarian, Los Angeles (2022). Manal Kara has previously exhibited with HAIR+NAILS as part of group shows HEAT (at Easy Does It, Los Angeles, 2024), Felix Fair (Los Angeles, 2024), NADA Fair (NYC, 2023 and 2021), The Human Scale (Rochester Art Center, Rochester MN, 2021), RIGHT NOW (2020).

www.manalkara.com