Leyla Yenirce

Born 1992 in Qubîn, Kurdistan
Lives and works in Berlin, 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.

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 and sound installation Spitter will be displayed at Kunstmuseum Magdeburg. Yenirce's video work Being Strong is Hard was screened at the International Film Festival Rotterdam. The artist's installation work Nacht. Schlaf. Die Sterne. is currently on view at Museum Folkwang, Essen. Among other notable institutions, Yenirce has exhibited at Kunsthalle Münster (2024); Haus der Kunst, Munich (2023); Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst, Leipzig (2023); and Halle für Kunst Lüneburg (2022). Yenirce is one of the recipients of the 2024 Kunstpreis Berlin and the 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 collections of Mudam – The Contemporary Art Museum of Luxembourg; Detroit Institute of Arts Museum; Kunstmuseum Magdeburg and Kistefos Museum, Norway.

New Album: Souvenirs

As part of Yenirce’s current exhibition Eye Level at Petzel Gallery in New York, the artist debuts a new album.

Souvenirs is an aural experience channeling an archive of memories. This LP, composed under the artist’s music project Rosaceae, imagines a space in which the listener can convoke with the dead, where the living are long gone. During a residency in Paris, the artist visited the Sacré-Cœur cathedral in Montmartre, overlooking the city. Yenirce was reminded of the construction of the Ilisu Dam and the subsequent flooding in her home region, as the artist’s family had to exhume and relocate their ancestral tombs to the tops of neighboring mountains. Yenirce shapes sound through recorded vocals, field recordings, and ambient instrumentation. Through these soundscapes, Yenirce opens a space for exchange and transmission.

The album was written and produced by the artist with additional vocals by Shira Lewis, mixed by Anders Fallesen and mastered by Rashad Becker. The vinyl copy includes a text written by Mazlum Nergiz.