Artist talk & short lecture

In the context of Leyla Yenirce – SO MUCH ENERGY

Leyla Yenirce (photo by Ralf Köster) | Dastan Jasim (photo by Riccardo Prevete)


Artist talk & short lecture
Wednesday, 19 October 2022, 7 pm

Short lecture
History of this resistance in Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey and the situation today 
by Dastan Jasim (Doctoral fellow, German Institute for Global and Area Studies)

Artist talk with Leyla Yenirce and Anna Nowak
With prior curator’s guided tour through the exhibition, 6 pm

Video documentation


In September 2022, Jina Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish woman in Tehran who was under police custody, dies in a hospital from a brain hemorrhage caused by severe violence. A few days earlier, she had been arrested by moral police force for her outward appearance. The incident has led to massive, brutal protests in Iran and outside the country’s borders for three weeks. The demonstrators shout “Jin, Jiyan, Azadî – women, life, freedom. This slogan has its origins in the decades-long history of resistance of the Kurdish people, especially Kurdish women. The short lecture situates the specific history of resistance in Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey with regard to the current situation.

Dastan Jasim is a Doctoral Fellow at the German Institute for Global and Area Studies in Hamburg and researches on the political culture of Kurdish people in Iran, Iraq, Syria and Turkey. For her work, she is regularly in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, where she last conducted her field research in spring 2022.


Leyla Yenirce‘s first institutional solo exhibition SO MUCH ENERGY will be on view at Kunsthaus Hamburg from October 15 through December 4, 2022.

In her artistic practice across multiple media, the artist deals with the representation of resistance as well as cultural, medial and military structures of dominance. She 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.

At Kunsthaus Hamburg, the Yenirce interweaves life stories of different women who have resisted extreme grievances. The multimedia installation NACHT. SCHLAF. DIE STERNE, 2021 relies on an examination of the last days of the Hamburg painter Anita Rée, who committed suicide as a result of the burgeoning fascism. Violence, destruction and extinction are reflected in the projection of blowing hair, impelling noise and aggressive dynamics of industrial propellers. The haunting sound merges with the voices of British freedom fighter Anna Campbell and Iraqi Yezidi human rights activist and genocide survivor Lamiya Aji Bashar. The relationship between power and helplessness is explored in many ways in the exhibition. Through the force of the rotating propellers as well as on a visual and acoustic level, it becomes a physical experience.

Curated by Anna Nowak

Leyla Yenirce (*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).


FURTHER EVENTS

Book launch 
Thursday17 November 2022, 6 pm
Reading with the authors Enis Maci & Mazlum Nergiz
Followed by DJ-Set €uro€y€z (One Mother)

Finissage
Sunday, 4 December 2022, 4 pm
Artist talk, Leyla Yenirce & Anna Nowak
with Dr. Karin Schick (Head of Collection Modern Art, Hamburger Kunsthalle)


Guided tours
Wednesday, 19 October 2022, 6 pm
Friday25 November 2022, 6 pm
Sunday, 4 December 2022, 3 pm


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