SO MUCH ENERGY
Finissage
Free admission
Karin Schick (photo by Max Lindroth) | Leyla Yenirce (photo by Ralf Köster)
On the last exhibition day of Leyla Yenirce's first institutional solo exhibition, Kunsthaus Hamburg invites you to a tour of the exhibition followed by an artist talk: curator Anna Nowak will give some insights about the exhibition and its backgrounds, and Karin Schick (Head of Collection Modern Art, Hamburger Kunsthalle) will talk with artist Leyla Yenirce about her work.
In her artistic practice across multiple media, the artist Leyla Yenirce 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
Karin Schick studied art history, philosophy and German language and literature in Tübingen and Boston; dissertation on the reception of Paul Cézanne in the USA. After employments at the Hamburger Kunsthalle and the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart, she worked as director of the Kirchner Museum Davos from 2006 to 2012. Since December 2012, she is Head of Collection Modern Art at the Hamburger Kunsthalle. Publications and exhibitions on Max Beckmann, Sonia and Robert Delaunay, Otto Dix, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Paula Modersohn-Becker, Emil Nolde, Anita Rée, Dieter Roth/Ingrid Wiener, Sophie Taeuber-Arp, and Andy Warhol, among others.
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 Ars Viva Prize (2023), 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).