Note · 7 October 2026
[ku]51/26Art
Art Prize of the SPD Parliamentary Group of Lower Saxony: the award to Leyla Yenirce
On the screen at the Sprengel Museum, Leyla Yenirce was already leaping across a barren landscape before anyone had said a word. Yesterday she received the Art Prize of the SPD parliamentary group, and I had my camera with me.
A Leap
Yesterday evening at the Sprengel Museum Hanover: Leyla Yenirce received the Art Prize of the SPD parliamentary group of Lower Saxony. In July I had helped choose her for the BBK Lower Saxony; yesterday I stood in the hall with around 200 guests and in front of the stage with my camera. A video still was already running on the screen, a woman in mid leap across a barren landscape.
What leapt across the screen
The laudation was given by Dr. Anna Heinze, director of the Landesmuseum Kunst & Kultur Oldenburg, with whom I sat on the jury. She put exactly this video at the centre. Leyla Yenirce shot it in the area of her birthplace in the Kurdish part of Turkey, where the Ilısu dam on the Tigris has flooded whole stretches of land. For an exhibition she had the single frames of the leap printed on dozens of mugs, lined up like a flipbook. As a photographer, I was won over at once.
The raised arms
The prize was presented by Minister-President Olaf Lies and Stefan Politze, chair of the SPD parliamentary group. Then Leyla Yenirce herself stood at the lectern and spoke about Walter Benjamin’s angel of history, driven into the future by the storm of the past. With your arms raised, she said, you also look as if you were cheering. The past pushes her forward, but she leaps as it does.
With your arms raised, you also look as if you were cheering.
Afterwards
The evening continued in the foyer, with wine, small glasses of food and long conversations at the standing tables. Rüdiger Stanko, who received the prize last year, sat in the audience this time. He is an old hand of Hanover’s cultural scene and could tell me, the newcomer in this circle, a story about almost every guest. With Leyla and the gallery Capitain Petzel some lovely anecdotes about politics and art came together, and with Dagmar Schmidt of the BBK a conversation with the Bundesakademie für Kulturelle Bildung about a possible collaboration. And I even appear in one picture, because somebody took the camera off me.
28 pictures of the whole evening, from the entrance to the last standing table, are in the magazine.
Read the whole story in the magazine →