Leyla Yenirce has developed an artistic practice defined by layered expressions that connect her works across mediums. Using layers of storytelling and archiving she investigates the politics of visibility by combining current affairs and historical elements with cultural context, then intertwining it all with personal, collective and historic accounts and experiences via a defining female presence, which are finally met with an overlay of fictional components.
Yenirce, born in Kurdistan and based in Berlin, finds her voice in the complex resonant spaces she creates by occupying the in-between and considering the complexities of existing systems, binaries and dichotomies. With a practice spanning film, sound and music, installation, painting, mixed media and performance, Yenirce’s individual works, as well as the entire body of work, serve as archives and are presented like collages of thoughts and physical expressions, that are inhabited by central female protagonists.
Describing her work as feminist yet not intended as a form of political criticism, Yenirce investigates cultural dominance structures and directs the gaze very deliberately and with a keen sense of responsibility that’s embedded in anthropological concerns. Whether by reading historical accounts, articles on current affairs, Tolstoy and a myriad of novels or spending extensive time researching, Yenirce considers points of intersection, and how fictionalized themes of real life can contribute to the complexities of a narrative still rooted in reality, which is an approach evident especially in her latest body of mixed media works.
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