Nil Yalter

Nil Yalter (born 1938) is a Turkish contemporary feminist artist. She attended Robert College in Istanbul, Turkey. Her work is included in many collections and museums, which includes drawings, photographs, videos, and performance art. She is the first Turkish female video artist. She is Turkish and later in her life became also a French national. She received her education from Robert College in Istanbul, Turkey. The poster writes ″Şu Gurbetlik Zor Zanaat Zor″ in Turkish which has been translated as ″Exile is hard work″, aims to raise awareness of the situation of people in exile. However, "gurbetlik" does not mean "exile", but rather someone living in a different country than their own.

Early career Yalter moved to Paris in 1965 and took part in the French counterculture and revolutionary movements which prompted her to move away from abstract constructivist painting to start working with the medium of video and to use her own body. In the 1970s, she led the beginning of the French feminist art movement. Topak Ev marked the beginning of Yalter's use of sociological and ethnographic methods in her work. While the installation was based on research conducted around Niğde on nomadic tents, the exhibition also included panels gathering drawings, collages, photographs and handwritten descriptions on the structure and dimensions of nomadic tents, materials used in their making and decorative elements. . That same year, she created a video titled The Headless Woman (The Belly Dance), a piece that stands out in French contemporary art history as one of the early feminist-art classics. The video frames the artist's belly as she writes a text on around her navel. The text is an excerpt from René Nelli's Erotique et Civilisations (1972) and states that "a woman's sexuality is both convex and concave", emphasizing the vaginal and clitoral orgasmic potentials of women. Yalter then "activates" the text by belly dancing, the gyrations of her belly animate the letters. A video installation created in collaboration with Judy Blum and Nicole Croizet in 1974, La Roquette, Prison de Femmes reconstructs the living conditions in the Roquette women's prison in Paris with a video and series of photographs and drawings based on former inmate Mimi's memories related to daily rites and objects describing the experience of a panoptical space.

Yalter was a member of several collectives of female artists in Paris in the 1970s, such as Femmes en Lutte and Femmes/Art which gathered around socially engaged practices and the women's struggle for visibility in the arts. From 1980 to 1995, Yalter acted as an associate at Sorbonne University.

Later career

In the 1990s, with the advent of digital technologies, Nil Yalter developed her video practice by using 3D animation techniques and electronic sound editing. Multiplying the image and its surface by way of geometrical shapes, this use of digital techniques operates interruptions within the image and opens up a space for intertextuality in her video works. Most emblematic of this process is Pixelismus (1996) which took the form of an interactive CD-ROM. The work is an investigation of the relationship between Byzantine mosaics and pixels, inspired by the writings of Malevitch on modernism. The exhibition brought wider international exposure to Yalter's work, and she has enjoyed a large number of solo exhibitions since then. In 2016, she had two retrospectives, "Off The Record" at Arter, Istanbul and "Nil Yalter", Frac Lorraine, Metz, and a monographic exhibition at La Verriere - Fondation Hermes, Brussels, followed by "D'apres Stimmung" in 2017 at Ludwig Museum, Cologne. In 2018, she was the recipient of "Outstanding Merit Award" AWARE 2018.

Her most recent works produced between 2015 and 2018 were exhibited at her solo exhibition Kara Kum at Galerist, Istanbul in March–April 2018.

In November 2023, she was awarded the Golden Lion for lifetime achievement by the Venice Biennale for her oeuvre. Her work will be celebrated at the 60th edition of the biennale, during the opening ceremony on April 20, 2024.

Collections Nil Yalter's works are held in the permanent collections of Tate Modern, Ludwig Museum, Long Beach Museum, Aksanat, Koç Contemporary, Reydan Weiss Collection, Deutsche Telekom Art Collection, Foto Colectania Foundation, Coleccion Olorvisual and Sammlung Verbund. 12th Berlin Biennale (2022), 10th Gwangju Biennale (2014), the 13th Istanbul Biennale (2013), 10th Paris Biennale (1977) and traveling survey exhibitions such as WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution (Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art; PS1 MoMa New York; Contemporary Art Center Vancouver 2007-2008), elles@centrepompidou (Centre Pompidou Paris; Centro Cultural Banco de Brazil, Rio de Janeiro; Seattle Art Museum 2013) and Desire for Freedom (Deutsches Historisches Museum, Berlin; Palazzo Reale, Milano; Eesti Kunstimuuseum – Kumu Kunstimuuseum, Tallinn; Muzeum Sztuki Wspólczesnej MOCAK, Krakau 2013).

In recent years her work has been shown at: WIELS, Brussels (2017), Clark House Initiative / Kadist Art Foundation, Mumbai (2014); Museum of Modern Art Rio de Janeiro (2014); SALT Istanbul (2013); Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen Rotterdam (2012); Centro Cultural Belem Lisbon (2010); Akademie der Kunst Berlin (2009).

In 2019, Fabienne Dumont co-curated a retrospective at the MAC VAL and edited two books: Nil Yalter - Where the memories of migrants, feminists and workers meet mythology (Vitry-sur-Seine, MAC VAL, 2019) and Nil Yalter - Interview with Fabienne Dumont (Paris, Manuella Editions, 2019).