Leyla Yenirce: SO MUCH ENERGY

Leyla Yenirce is an emerging and already much-awarded Hamburg-based artist (most recently Ars Viva Prize 2023) who is realizing her first solo exhibition at Kunsthaus Hamburg. Her artistic practice across multiple media is concerned with representation of resistance as well as cultural, media and military structures of dominance. In her multimedia installations, the artist deals with representations of martyrs on the conceptual level. Yenirce exposes the fine line between glorifying ideology and resistant emancipation, sensibly interrelating what is often assumed to be opposites: feminism and war, pop culture and genocide, desire, longing and irony. 

In her first solo show, Leyla Yenirce interweaves life stories of different women who have resisted grievances in extreme situations and asks: what circumstances drove the persons to their actions and what moved them in their environment? 

The video comprised in the multi-part work NACHT. SCHLAF. DIE STERNE., 2021 relies on an examination of the last days of the Hamburg painter Anita Rée. After asserting herself in a male-dominated art world and enjoying prestige, the independent women with Jewish roots committed suicide on Sylt in 1933 during the rise of fascism. Violence, destruction and extinction are reflected in the projection of blowing hair, but also in the impelling noise and aggressive dynamics of industrial propellers. The forceful sound, consisting of tank noises, digital effects, synthesizers and found footage, merges with the voices of British freedom fighter Anna Campbell, who fell fighting the Turkish military in the Kurdish city of Afrin in Rojava in 2018, and the Iraqi-Yezidis human rights activist Lamiya Aji Bashar. The survivor of the genocide against the Yezidis managed to escape from IS. The relationship between power and helplessness is investigated from multiple angles in the installation. Through the driving force of movement of the rotating propellers in the space as well as on a visual and acoustic level, the exhibition becomes a physical experience. 

Curated by Anna Nowak.

Leyla Yenirce (b. 1992 in Qubîn, Kurdistan) finished her Fine Arts studies at the Hamburg University of Fine Arts in 2022. She has been also awarded for the Bundespreis für Kunststudierende, Bonn (2021). Yenirce has been part of Kein Schlussstrich Festival, Kampnagel, Hamburg (2021), Paradise, Kurdish Film Festival, Berlin (2020) and Hi Ventilation, Kunstverein Harburger Bahnhof, Hamburg (2019). 

Opening: October 14, 7pm
Performance by Leyla Yenirce and concert by Preach (One Mother)

Artist talk and short lecture: October 19, 7pm
Leyla Yenirce, Anna Nowak with Dastan Jasim (German Institute for Global and Area Studies)

Book launch: November 17, 6pm
Reading with the authors Enis Maci & Mazlum Nergiz, followed by DJ-Set €pro€y€z (One Mother)

Finissage: December 4, 3pm
Guided tour with Anna Nowak
Artist talk: Leyla Yenirce & Dr. Karin Schick (Head of Collection Modern Art, Hamburger Kunsthalle)

Kindly supported by Hamburgische Kulturstiftung & Alfried Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach-Stiftung.