Leyla YENİRCE

Leyla Yenirce is a contemporary artist, musician, and filmmaker born in 1992 in Qubînê, Kurdistan, and currently living and working in Berlin. She maintains an interdisciplinary practice that brings together film, video, sound, music, painting, performance, and installation. Her work focuses particularly on Kurdish history and experience, women's resistance, war, feminism, migration, memory, and media and power relations.

After studying Metropolitan Culture at HafenCity University Hamburg, Yenirce continued her education at the Hamburg University of Fine Arts (HFBK). Within her artistic practice, she frequently reworks archival images, found footage, photographs, films, and sound recordings. By combining image and sound, she explores how resistance is represented, how historical memory is constructed, and how cultural, media, and military forms of power affect individuals. Sound and music also play a central role in her work; she develops experimental music projects under the name Rosaceae.

The artist's first solo exhibition, SO MUCH ENERGY, was presented at Kunsthaus Hamburg in 2022. The exhibition brought together the life stories of women who resisted conditions of oppression and violence across different historical periods. That same year, she also exhibited her work at Halle für Kunst Lüneburg. Awarded the ars viva Prize in 2022, Yenirce participated in the Holy. Energy. Masters. Ars viva 2023 exhibition, presented at Goethe-Institut Paris and later at Haus der Kunst, Munich, as part of the award programme.

In 2023, her work was shown at Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst Leipzig and other prominent institutions. The following year marked a period of increased international visibility. She participated in exhibitions at Museum Folkwang Essen, Deichtorhallen/Falckenberg Collection Hamburg, Kunsthalle Münster, and Kunstmuseum Magdeburg. In the same year, her first solo exhibition in New York, Eye Level, was presented at Petzel Gallery. The exhibition combined portraits of Kurdish women fighters with archival materials while also incorporating the sonic world of her Rosaceae project.

In 2025, she took part in exhibitions at institutions including the NS-Dokumentationszentrum Munich and Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k.). In 2026, she presented a more comprehensive overview of her work through the solo exhibition Werdegang at Landesmuseum Oldenburg. The same year also saw her participation in exhibitions at Museum Brandhorst Munich, MUDAM Luxembourg, and other international institutions.

Yenirce has received numerous distinctions, including the ars viva Prize (2022/23), the Berlin Art Prize (2024), and the Finkenwerder Förderpreis (2026), as well as the Federal Prize for Art Students and the Playground Art Prize.

Rather than merely representing the Kurdish experience, Yenirce's practice reconstructs histories, memories, forms of resistance, and power relations through archive, sound, image, body, and music. In this respect, her work offers a compelling example of how the Kurdish experience, women's resistance, and migration-shaped memory are articulated within contemporary art and the wider European art landscape.