Nil Yalter
at the heart of exile
November 2024
One of the many provocations of this 2024 Venice Biennale, entitled ‘Foreigners Everywhere’, was to award prizes to two elderly women artists, relatively unknown yet great pioneers. One of them, Nil Yalter, is exhibiting in the Central Pavilion, in the multimedia installations section, a group entitled Exile is a Hard Job (1983-2024), to which she has added, in the centre, a reconstitution of Topak Ev, a huge yurt, the very yurt that made her name in Paris in 1973 at ARC (Animation. Recherche. Confrontation) and that so seduced Susanne Pagé when she directed this structure created at the end of the 1960s within the Musée d'Art moderne de la Ville de Paris.
Portrait of Nil Yalter © Oliver Abraham
Made from metal, sheepskin and felt, it is a tribute by the Franco-Turkish artist to the women of the nomadic communities of Central Anatolia. It is placed in Venice in the centre of a domed room, the walls of which are covered with flying posters, drawings, videos and more. This piece comments on, documents and brings life to migration and exile.
Nil Yalter has spent her life highlighting the experiences of exiles. So it's only natural that the 60th Venice Biennale 2024 should have awarded her a Golden Lion for her entire career, and that she should also be featured in the ‘Exiles’ exhibition at the Louvre-Lens.
Nil Yalter, Topak Ev, 1973, metal, sheepskin, leather, text and mixed media, Ø 3 m, part of the video installation Exile is a hard job, 1983-2024 presented at the Venice Biennale, 2024, ©MATTEO DE MAYDA. COURTESY LA BIENNALE DE VENICE.
From Cairo to Paris
Nil Yalter is herself one of these migrants, even if her journeys and exile were, in her case, carefully chosen. Born in Cairo in 1938, but a Turkish citizen, she moved to Istanbul, then spent her youth wandering through Iran, India and the remotest parts of Turkey... And after years of curious and studious wanderings, she devoted herself to painting. Westernised abstract painting, which enabled this self-taught artist to exhibit in galleries in Istanbul. Aware that the true contemporary art of her time lay elsewhere, she resumed her wanderings and finally settled in Paris, on rue Mazarine, in 1965. What followed were years of acclimatisation, of research in a bustling Paris, of cosmopolitan encounters and political commitments. Gradually, a desire emerged to show, without pathos, in its raw truth, what the artistic world in general stubbornly refused to see: emigrants, those left behind. Her work therefore combines photography, writing and drawing, with the aim of documenting her own experiences. She adds collage, Polaroid, film, digital, video in full gestation, and all the new digital media.
The belly dance
The meeting took place at the Berthet- Aittouarès gallery, since the artist does not have a studio to speak of, but rather rooms cluttered with panoply of equipment, computers of all generations, tapes, old-style slide carousels, monitors, video recorders, cameras, screens and numerous drawings... Nil Yalter prefers to tell us about her work by commenting on a few works that Odile Aittouarès has hung on the walls for the occasion, photographs that were part of his exhibition organised here in 2023, ‘Exile is a Hard Job’, a title borrowed from the poet Nâzim Hikmet. These include the piece entitled La Femme sans tête ou La Danse du ventre. The photograph shows a woman's belly with her navel covered in a circular pattern
a fragment of text by the poet René Nelly, author of the book Érotique et Civilisations. The photo is taken from a performance filmed in 1974 in which she did a belly dance, having engraved on her skin the phrase ‘The true woman is both convex and concave’.
Portrait of Nil Yalter, courtesy Galerie Berthet-Aittouarès
Nil Yalter, The Headless Woman or the Belly Dance, courtesy galerie Berthet-Aittouarès
A new language
Despite the constant calls for her work since her recognition in Venice, the appointments she has made and a certain weariness, the 86-year-old artist remains extremely precise and retains a phenomenal memory of the details of her past installations. She is well aware that she invented a new language in the 1970s in Paris, when feminism was bursting onto the art scene, proposing heterogeneous works, decompartmentalising the arts and introducing the reality of the female body. It was a way of expressing oneself that had come straight from the United States, where a rebellious and aggressive feminist avant-garde had been arming itself for some time (see the article on Ana Mendieta in issue no. 826 of Connaissance des Arts, pp. 62-65).
Nil Yalter also deliberately chose to highlight the living conditions of the many workers stranded in poverty. In Turkey, she had already photographed women's prisons in Istanbul. In Paris, in the Sentier district, she shows how Turkish women fall ill by stirring carcinogenic tissues. She looks at the lives of many immigrants in the various camps and shanty towns in the suburbs, particularly the Portuguese who have just arrived. This committed artist works with associations, sociologists and local authorities. In the catalogue for the retrospective organised by the Mac Val in 2019, art historian Fabienne Dumont describes her work as ‘... somewhere between art and documentary, between aesthetics and politics, which makes it possible to express and show in a different way the situation suffered by certain populations. In her individual and collective projects, Nil Yalter pays particular attention to the experiences and beliefs of the people she meets, who are magnified by her gaze, without paternalism or naivety, but with respect for the difficult, even violent, conditions in which they live’. She aptly describes the artist's original attitude, ‘... at the confluence of migrant, feminist and working-class memories and mythologies’. Nil Yalter's work is multifaceted, made up of hybridisations, superimpositions of the present and the past, and reconstructions as a ‘tool for passing on testimony’. An immense fresco made up of tesserae to form a kaleidoscope vibrant with life, to deny total oblivion. But just as nothing ever disappears completely, these less-than-glorious shreds of history that we thought had been buried come back to us like a boomerang, in the midst of war, through other generations of immigrants. Her work has eerily contemporary echoes.
All exiles at Louvre-Lens
The exhibition at Louvre-Lens explores the often painful links between artistic creation and the feeling of exile, of all exiles. From the Odyssey to the present day. With her piece Exile is a Hard Job, 1983-2024, on loan from the Centre Pompidou, Nil Yalter takes her place alongside Victor Hugo and Kimsooja, Gustave Courbet and Barthélémy Toguo, Kader Attia and Marco Godinho. A bevy of artists whose themes range from departure to uprooting, nomadism, refugee camps, renewal... In short, a range of stories, traces and memories.
Elizabeth Védrenne
Nil Yalter at the Louvre Lens