With Serê Cîya, the Kunstverein 47m Contemporary presents a solo exhibition by artist Leyla Yenirce (*1992 in Qubînê, Kurdistan; lives and works in Berlin), which interweaves memory, resistance, political history, landscape, and geographic spaces. Across works in video, sound, performance, and painting and including a site specific newly comissioned work, she creates connections between the Kurdish mountains, Leipzig's Fockeberg, and Paris's Montmartre: sites that become symbolic carriers of origin, loss, and resistance.
At the center of the exhibition are the video works Being Strong Is Hard (2021) and My Playground Is a Graveyard (2026). While Being Strong Is Hard explores questions of resistance and media image production through a dense audiovisual flow, the newly created work My Playground Is a Graveyard shows the artist's appropriation of Leipzig's Fockeberg through bodily movement. The hill, formed from the rubble of the Second World War, becomes at once playground, stage, and site of memory, which the artist traverses in continuous motion.
At the architectural high point of the institution-the dome located 47 meters above street level-an acoustic experiential space is installed: Yenirce's album Souvenirs (2024) enters into a visual and spatial confrontation with the panoramic view over Leipzig. Created during a stay in Paris, where the artist composed the album overlooking the Sacré-Cœur Basilica on Montmartre, the work combines voices, field recordings, and atmospheric soundscapes into an archival narrative of personal and collective memory, addressing themes of origin and displacement.
Serê Cîya (Kurdish for "on the top of the mountain") unfolds a multi-layered topography in which past and present, individual experience, and collective memory intersect. The exhibition reveals how historical violence, political struggle, and personal memories become inscribed in landscapes.
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