This article first appeared in the Berlin Art Week 2026 special issue of Freitag.
A quiet studio courtyard in Berlin’s Wedding district. A piano stands behind a glass door. Leyla Yenirce comes down the stairs, smiles through the glass, opens the door and immediately closes it behind her again. »Something’s going on in there right now,« she says. »Let’s go to a café.« She hurriedly turns the key in the lock, and for a moment it almost seems as though whatever is going on inside is alive—as though it might escape. Exhibitions by the artist and musician, born in Qubîn, Kurdistan, in 1992, have titles such as ›So Much Energy‹ and ›Ich krieg Geschwindigkeit‹ (I’m Gaining Speed). Perhaps locking the studio has less to do with caution, then, than with the energy of her art. For Berlin Art Week, Yenirce presents three paintings created specifically for Konzerthaus Berlin under the title ›The Canvas as Concert Hall‹. The original works can be seen on 13 September in the Werner-Otto-Saal as part of ›Stühle‹ (Chairs), her performance with artist and musician Solomon Garçon. Two of the paintings will hang as banners on the façade of Konzerthaus Berlin, while the third appears on the cover of its new programme brochure.
Yenirce found her way into art through music, in Hamburg and the circle around the Golden Pudel Club. Since 2016, she has released five albums under the name Rosaceae. Dark sound, as though hewn from concrete, forms part of her exhibitions; her paintings, too, seem to follow their own rhythm, have their own volume. She often paints without music, she says, because the paintings themselves are already »loud« and she needs to »listen« to them.
The collaboration, curated by Sandra Teitge, launches a series inviting visual artists to develop works for Konzerthaus Berlin. Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s neoclassical building originally opened as a theatre, burnt out during the Second World War, was rebuilt and reopened in 1984 as a concert hall in the GDR—a cultural-political counterpart, so to speak, to the Philharmonie in West Berlin. Tobias Rempe, who took over as artistic director last summer, now wants to open the institution up to a younger audience.
As Yenirce and I walk along Müllerstraße towards the café, past towers of watermelons weighing kilos apiece, she fires off questions about my ring, my bag, where I live. It feels as though she is playfully reversing the roles. Instead of receiving me in her studio, she takes me outside. Instead of answering questions, she asks them.
Some pop song about love is playing in the café. Yenirce loudly sings along to the chorus and orders a cappuccino, then we sit outside in the shade. She tells me about her three paintings for Konzerthaus Berlin. For them, she has archival photographs and floor plans sent to her, screenprints them onto canvas, then spends four weeks building up layer after layer of oil and spray paint. »When I’d finished making the screen with the photograph,« she recalls, »I thought: it’s funny, really, shrinking the Konzerthaus down until I can hold it in my hand.« Just as she did on the way to the café, here too she reverses the roles.
Luminous turquoise, orange, yellow, and red seem to set the building’s history in motion. The colours swirl through the black-and-white photographs, sweeping them along. The symmetry of the concert hall, the rows of seats and the stage with its curtain remain visible, even as some photographs are drenched entirely in red, painted over in white, or cut across by an orange brushstroke. On one canvas, Leyla Zana appears at a microphone—the Kurdish politician after whom Yenirce was named. Zana was sentenced to ten years in prison after speaking Kurdish in the Turkish parliament. The political motif finds an echo in the history of the building on Gendarmenmarkt: in the revolutionary year of 1848, the Prussian National Assembly met there.
In 1995, at the age of three, Yenirce moved to Oldenburg with her Kurdish-Yazidi family. Later, instead of going to concerts or parties after school, she worked. She sat at a supermarket checkout, tutored, babysat and cleaned to help support her parents. Looking back, she describes that period simply as »hard«. Only years later, while painting, did she recognise something familiar in the process. Dipping a brush into paint, washing it out, dipping it in again. »I thought: Huh? What am I doing here? I’m cleaning again.« Cleaning, she says, made her the painter she is today.
At the time, becoming an artist was the last thing on her mind. Studying cultural anthropology after finishing school offered »a good reason to move out of home«, she recalls. In Hamburg, Pierre Bourdieu, Judith Butler, and Walter Benjamin changed the way she saw the world. An exchange year in the US eventually prompted her to start making art herself. There, she made her first video work: biology students in a laboratory, accompanied by an experimental heartbeat assembled from found audio material.
In August 2014, shortly after returning to Hamburg, she received news of the genocide committed by the »Islamic State« against Yazidis in northern Iraq. From that point on, she says, time divided into a before and an after. Out of a sense of helplessness, she bought a synthesiser through the classifieds. Using YouTube tutorials, she taught herself to make music, collecting sounds and sampling them. She earned money working in two cafés. »It was clear: I was going to see this through.« She describes disappearing into sound as »absolute liberation«.
Soon she was playing her first concerts and releasing albums, before eventually enrolling at the Hamburg University of Fine Arts. In 2022, her final year, Kunsthaus Hamburg presented her first institutional solo exhibition, ›So Much Energy‹. The space was dark. Aggressive-looking propellers set the air in motion, while behind them video images showed hair blowing in the wind. Driving sounds poured from the speakers, interspersed with the voices of women who had resisted—Anita Rée, Anna Campbell, Lamiya Aji Bashar. Violence and defiance appear again and again in her work.
After years of working with video, performance, and sound, she began painting during the pandemic, initially out of a desire to go to the studio every day. Yenirce takes a sip of her cappuccino. »Why even paint today?« she asks, then answers her own question with a gesture: she raises both hands as though pressing against an invisible wall. »You can press the whole world into the canvas.« Building up layers of paint also involves a certain violence, she says, but the canvas can take it. I ask whether she paints on the floor, like Helen Frankenthaler. She nods. At the moment, she does so wearing denim shorts, a red Mickey Mouse T-shirt, and beige sandals. Her hero is Joan Mitchell, who called herself a »savage painter«.
Yenirce reads in bed every morning. These days, she says, reading is the most important part of her artistic practice. At the moment, Hannah Krall’s ›Proofs of Existence‹ lies on her bedside table. Afterwards, she takes the U-Bahn to the studio and spends the whole day there. She drinks up to six cups of filter coffee. For lunch, she has vegetables with rice or a salad. »I’m a nine-to-fiver.« Sometimes she paints, sometimes she just takes a nap or stares at the wall. »The more time I spend in the studio, the more interested I become in simply being there.«
I tell Yenirce I’m already sorry not to have seen her studio. I would have liked to describe the things inside: the calendars she collects and hangs on the wall—one from the Kurdistan Workers’ Party with images of war, one from the Yazidi community centre in Oldenburg, a trucker calendar that reminds her of her father. She nods and, as if to make up for it, holds out her hands to me. Her next exhibition at the gallery Capitain Petzel will be about voices and hands, she says—and about what happened in Berlin this summer. Her skin and closely cropped fingernails are speckled with pale blue. Then she pulls up the leg of her black linen trousers a little. Her knee is completely green.