MANAL KARA
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

Syntax-Semantics Interface (2024) at M. LeBlanc, Chicago.

Overdetermine, 2024
oil on canvas
55 x 112 in. (139.70 x 284.48 cm)
MK0011

Performing, 2024
oil on canvas
51½ x 24 in. (130.81 x 60.96 cm)
MK0014

Cinepoetics 3, 2024
oil on canvas
24 x 48 in. (60.96 x 121.92 cm)
MK0010

Syntax-Semantics Interface (2024) at M. LeBlanc, Chicago.

Cognitive Architecture , 2024
round leaf bittersweet, grape, steel, pine, acrylic, maple samaras, vinyl, stickers, chain mail, found objects
30 x 20 x 11 in. (76.20 x 50.80 x 27.94 cm)
MK0016

Jesse Guitar, 2023
plywood, bittersweet vine, sleeping bag, acrylic, rusted Skoal chewing tobacco can, chrome Bulova wristwatch from train tracks, 1/4" jacks, knobs, resin exoskeleton, Power Leech fishing lure, and lightning cable tip
54 x 13.3 x 2.3 in (137 x 34 x 6 cm)
MK0008

Argania Spinoza, 2020
ceramic, photographic prints on cotton
29 x 23 x 4 in (73.7 x 78.4 x 10.2 cm)

Fourth moon, seventh sun, a journey with no end in sight, past the pyla (orgones in tow), two false dogstars to the left, casseiopeia to the right, sidhe & djinns in every direction, 2021
ceramic, photographic prints on fabric
41.5 x 41.5 x 4 in (105.4 x 105.4 x 20.3 cm)