Hanging side by side on opposite walls, eight three-metre-high paintings dominate the central room of Leyla Yenirce’s solo show ‘Ich krieg Geschwindigkeit’ (I’m Gaining Speed). Filled with aggressive swirls and splotches of blue, red, yellow, pink and purple paint, they seem to hum with frenetic energy. Silkscreen prints of soldiers from the Women’s Protection Unit (YPJ), an all-female Kurdish military group, structure every composition, at times almost unrecognizable amid multiple layers of oil paint and acrylic spray. In Polterabend (Bachelor Party, 2022), for instance, the outline of a soldier’s body and her AK47 are barely visible through dark blue circles and traces of yellow. The blurred lines of a blueprint rendered in Barbie pink creep across the top of the painting, while other sections of the canvas are left blank.
Rhythm of the Night I–IV (all 2023) – a series of smaller, square-format paintings installed on Capitain Petzel’s mezzanine floor – contrasts with the larger works, both in form and content. While the latter pieces highlight the inquisitive gaze of an individual soldier, here the artist crops the image to shift the focus onto the object the fighter’s gaze fixates on: a hand pointing at a notebook with a pen. The imminent aggression suggested by the gun-filled image is replaced by a sense of gentle curiosity and, with it, Yenirce’s approach to her paintings changes, too. In several works, the canvas is first coated with a layer of dark silver paint, giving it a more muted appearance. Across the series, acrylic spray is also used sparingly in thinner, more subtle lines.
The motif connecting the two series is a crop from an AFP photograph illustrating an Al Arabiya news article about the death of a German soldier in Kurd-ISIS clashes in Qamishli, Syria, in 2015, which Yernice found on the internet. Kurdish-born, the artist is both fascinated by these images of female fighters, which play an important role in YPJ’s communications strategy, and repelled by their ubiquity. Although the photograph picked here suggests an empowering environment, it is likely that, as Yenice pointed out in an accompanying artist talk, most of these young women are already dead. Repetition is thus a strategy against indifference, forcing a new look by slowing down the rhythm of how we interact with and disseminate images of war online.
