With Leyla Yenirce and Dastan Jasim
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
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.
In her artistic practice across multiple media, the 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. Her first institutional solo exhibition SO MUCH ENERGY will be on view at Kunsthaus Hamburg from October 15 through December 4, 2022.
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 (*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).