Manal Kara is a Moroccan-American interdisciplinary artist and poet whose work moves fluidly across sculpture, painting, text, and installation. Rooted in daily rituals and guided by an intuitive process, Kara constructs hybrid objects from materials found in their immediate surroundings—junkyards, woods, beach dunes—creating assemblages that combine gnarled wood, rusted metal, and laser-cut acrylic with poetic language and visual glyphs. Their work draws on biosemiotic theory, indigenous epistemologies, and sympoietic systems to elaborate new modes of meaning-making—conceptual ecologies that challenge fixed ontologies. Whether through modular arrangements of asemic poetry or psychogeographic sculptural forms, Kara’s practice proposes language itself as a material site of fragmentation, speculation, and reconstitution.

Their recent exhibition Syntax–Semantics Interface at M. LeBlanc marked a major foray into painting, where text becomes spatial and logic gives way to conjured, alternate grammars. Kara’s visual language resists stable interpretation, instead generating systems in which form and meaning remain perpetually in flux.

Manal Kara (b. 1986 Pennsylvania, based in Gary, IN) is a Moroccan-American self-taught interdisciplinary artist. Their work has been exhibited extensively in Chicago and New York as well as in Istanbul, Vienna, and Berlin. Recent solo exhibitions include The Wild Thing Rides Again, Hair+Nails, Minneapolis (2024); Sacred Topologies, Deli Gallery, New York (2023); Hypothèses, Pangée, Montréal (2022); Conjectures, Shulamit Nazarian, Los Angeles (2022); Xylem & Phlöem, No Place, Columbus (2021); The Viewing-Room vs. The Adoring-Gaze, Interstate Projects, Brooklyn (2020); Song of the Other Worm, Prairie, Chicago (2019), and Tearassin’ Like a Slug Outta Heaven, Basketshop, Cincinnati (2019). They have attended residencies at 8th House, Shandaken: Storm King, ACRE, Ox-Bow, September Spring at the Kesey Farm, and Project Freewill.

CURRICULUM VITAE

EXHIBITIONS

May 31st to July 6th, 2024
Syntax-Semantics Interface

October 18th to November 20th 2021
MOLOCH