Holy Water, 2023
Born 1992 in Qubîn, Kurdistan
Lives and works in Hamburg, Germany
Leyla Yenirce finds her voice in the complex resonant spaces she creates, often working collaboratively, staging performances, incorporating found footage into her videos or appropriating images that are visible through dense layers of paint in her works on canvas. Yenirce draws on an archive of films and photographs that deal with figurations of resistance and aspects of military, media and cultural structures of dominance. Her process of collecting testifies to the widespread circulation of images depicting women in resistance, while also suggesting Yenirce's own media-influenced relationship with the country of her birth, Kurdistan. She is able to apply the technique of sampling in different artistic forms reacting to what she has found by layering and collaging in her compositions, elaborate installations, video works, performances and paintings.
Yenirce has been described as a cultural theorist, filmmaker, musician, painter performer and installation artist, essentially combining all of the aforementioned mediums in her artistic practice. It is precisely her willingness to transcend the boundaries of set disciplines that enables the artist to unite what is often mutually exclusive: feminism and war, pop culture and genocide, genuine longing and detached irony.
Leyla Yenirce is currently based in Hamburg, Germany. Having graduated from the Hamburg University of Fine Arts, her first solo exhibition SO MUCH ENERGY took place at the Kunsthaus Hamburg in 2022. In 2024, Yenirce's video work Being Stong is Hard was screened at the International Film Festival Rotterdam. The artist will also participate in group exhibitions at Museum Folkwang, Essen and Kunsthalle Münster, and perform at the Elbphilharmonie, Hamburg. Among other notable institutions, Yenirce has exhibited at Haus der Kunst, Munich (2023); Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst, Leipzig (2023) and Halle für Kunst Lueneburg (2022). Yenirce is one of the recipients of the 2024 Kunstpreis Berlin and 2022 ars viva Prize. In addition to numerous other scholarships and prizes, including Federal Prize for Art Students, Bonn (2021), the Playground Art Prize, Nuremberg (2021) and the Hamburg Music Prize (2019), Yenirce has been part of various group exhibitions, including Video Digest #1, Moltkerei, Cologne (2023), Gallery Weekend Festival, Studio Mondial, Berlin (2023), Kein Schlussstrich Festival, Kampnagel, Hamburg (2021), Paradise, Kurdish Film Festival, Berlin (2020) and Hi Ventilation, Kunstverein Harburger Bahnhof, Hamburg (2019). Her work is held in the permanent collection of Detroit Institute of Arts Museum.