“Eye Level,” paintings by Leyla Yenirce,
October 30-December 14
Leyla Yenirce, born in 1992 in Qubîn, Basur, is a painter, musician, performer and installation artist, currently based in Berlin. Combining portraiture of female Kurdish freedom fighters with a spectral sonic landscape, Yenirce explores themes of resistance and dominance.
oil, acrylic spray, and screen print on canvas
Her recent paintings depict female Kurdish freedom fighters using binoculars to survey the land and sky. One fighter, who sits aside and reads a book. The Sumerian language appears as cuneiform in gold. The Sumerian script, familiar to the artist through her Yazidi background, signals the written word, while the brushstrokes evoke associations of inscription or signature.
Additionally, Yenirce layers blueprints of F-16 fighter jets, used by Turkey in conflict with these women fighters. She also uses Google Earth views of the controversial Ilisu Dam project, built and finalized by Turkey in 2018. While the fighter jets control the area from the sky, the dam has flooded about 200 villages, submerging regions where people have lived for millennia. As the artist states, only between the earth and the sky, “on eye level, can these women [fighters] exist.”
Amid these materials, she places an image of herself as a child, representing her relationship with Kurdistan, as mediated through mass-circulated images of feminist resistance. Her complex compositions fuse signposts of war with geographies of displacement.
A new album
Yenirce also debuts an album, Souvenirs, composed during a residency in Paris in January 2024. The Sacré-Cœur cathedral in Montmartre, overlooking the city, reminded her of the construction of the Ilisu Dam and the subsequent flooding in her home region, as her family had to exhume and relocate their ancestral tombs to the tops of neighboring mountains. In Souvenirs, she imagines a space where the listener can convoke with the dead, through recorded vocals, field recordings, and ambient instrumentation. The album cover includes a self-portrait of the artist en route to her brother’s wedding, once again layering her personal archive with larger geopolitical realities.
You can listen to Souvenirs digitally here. A vinyl version of the album is available at the Petzel Bookstore.
Eye Level, an exhibition of her new paintings and a musical album, is on view from October 30 to December 14, 2024, at the Petzel Gallery, 35 East 67th Street..
