Nil Yalter (born 1938) is a Turkish contemporary feminist artist. She attended Robert College in Istanbul, Turkey and currently lives and works in Paris. Her work, which is included in many collections and museums, includes not only drawings and photographs, but also videos and performance art. In fact she is the first Turkish female video artist.
Early life
Nil Yalter was born in 1938 in Cairo, Egypt where she lived until the age of four. She is Turkish and later in her life became also a French national. She received her education from Robert College in Istanbul, Turkey. She started painting at an early age and took dance and ballet classes. In 1956, she traveled to India on foot while practicing pantomime. She had her first exhibition of paintings inspired by this travel at the French Cultural Institute in Mumbai (Bombay) in 1957. Between 1963 and 1964 she worked as stage and costume designer for theatre companies in Istanbul. In 1963, she participated at the 3rd Paris Biennale with abstract compositions under the curatorship of Nurullah Berk. She moved to Paris in 1965, after she became politically involved with sociological topics, specifically focusing migration and women. Her poster exhibition, that has been hung around the world, was subject to criticism. The poster writes ″Şu Gurbetlik Zor Zaanat 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. In 1973, Yalter created an installation inspired by the temporary dwelling structures of Turkic nomads titled Topak Ev, a nomad's tent as a study of private, public and feminine spaces at A.R.C. Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. 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. In 1974, 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. The work is emblematic of some of the formal gestures and critical strategies Yalter developed in the coming years: creating a reversal of the male gaze by objectifying her own body through the camera, Yalter refers to women's sexual liberation from patriarchal control, while at the same time commenting on the Orientalist eroticization of Middle Eastern women in Western art.
Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Yalter created a series of works combining her interest in gender issues and feminism with a focus on marginalized communities such as migrant workers in Europe and former prisoners. Temporary Dwellings, first exhibited in Grenoble, France, in 1977 investigates the living conditions and experiences of migrant workers as told by women. 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.