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M. LeBlanc

3514 West Fullerton Avenue
Chicago, ILL 60647
+1 773 360 7178

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M. LeBlanc

  • UPCOMING
  • CURRENT
  • ARTISTS
  • ARCHIVE
  • GALLERY
  Syntax-Semantics Interface  (2024) at M. LeBlanc, Chicago.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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)

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

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)

© 2024 M. LeBlanc International LLC