Nil Yalter

A pioneer of both video and feminist art, Nil Yalter (b.1938) has championed marginalised voices for the past five decades. This year, the Turkish–French artist received a Golden Lion Award for Lifetime Achievement at the 60th Venice Biennale for her innovative practice, which spans film, sculpture, multimedia installation and painting and engages with such sociopolitical themes as migration, exile and female sexuality. Yalter was born in Cairo to a cosmopolitan Turkish couple and grew up in Istanbul; her grandmother and mother, who was a scholar, encouraged her to ‘be independent’ and to pursue her creative practice.¹ In 1957 she travelled with her then-partner on foot to Iran and India, working as a pantomime artist, and first exhibited her paintings in Mumbai. Her early geometric compositions FIG.1 were informed by Russian Constructivism and Suprematism, which, with no formal training, she had encountered only in reproductions. Such references sit alongside an enduring fascination with Byzantine and Ottoman motifs, resulting in canvases that rely on a dynamic tension between rigidity and ornamentation. In 1965 Yalter emigrated to Paris in search of an art education and quickly met the American gallerist Ileana Sonnabend, who had opened a gallery with her husband, Michael, in the city in 1962. There Yalter attended exhibitions, including of Andy Warhol’s Flowers paintings, and met such artists as Robert Rauschenberg and Robert Morris: ‘That was my schooling’, she now remarks.

After seven years of education through observation, and not exhibiting her work, Yalter began to move away from hard-edge painting towards a multidisciplinary practice that integrated her interests in ethnography, anthropology and sociology. A significant turning point was a return visit to Turkey in March 1972, which coincided with the trial of three young Marxist–Leninist revolutionaries, who were ultimately executed by hanging. Made in response to the ongoing trial, five drawings on brown butcher’s paper FIG.2 depict three painted circles, representing the activists, and a vertical line bisecting the page, which symbolises death. Across the works, the column of circles moves closer towards the line until they become hollow formations, cruelly bisected and emptied. The outcome of the trial devastated Yalter. On her return to Paris she rented a small room where for six months she displayed the works alongside newspaper pages and clippings accompanied by collages of photographs of herself making the work in Istanbul FIG.3. Her first installation, Deniz Gezmiş – titled after one of the activists – signalled a transition from the abstract canvas towards a more representative mode of expression. It also marked her first foray into politically engaged art.

Deniz Gezmiş can be seen as a precursor to Topak Ev (Round House; 1973), the first project of Yalter’s that garnered international attention and which became the archetype of her works focusing on migration and those living on the margins of society. First shown at the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris in 1973 FIG.4, the tent-like installation was informed by Yalter’s travels to Niğde in Anatolia to visit the semi-nomadic Bektik tribe. As is typical of Yalter’s practice, the project arose out of extensive research, gathered from the Central Asian collection at the Musée de l’Homme, Paris, with assistance from her friend, the ethnologist Bernard Dupaigne. As part of this process, she created nine collages that combine drawings of everyday and ritual objects with found materials, photographs and text, which provide in-depth insight into nomadic life.² Yalter was drawn to the yurt in particular because within the tribe it was the woman’s preserve – each structure was made and decorated by a bride-to-be from the age of puberty. At the same time, it also delineated the limits of her movements once she was married: ‘It’s like a womb, and she lets her husband come in if she wants. But then at the same time, she has no life outside. That’s the men’s domain […] it is a prison’.

Topak Ev is two metres in diameter and made of brown felt stretched over an aluminium frame; animal skins are draped over the top, painted with circular motifs and stitched with fringing that references the costumes of women shamans FIG.5, whose ritual practices have been a longstanding inspiration for Yalter. Fragments of poetry and literary texts are applied to the exterior.³ When the work was first shown in Paris, many visitors assumed that it symbolised a romantic yearning for nature.⁴ The artist, however, continues to rebuke this interpretation: ‘there's nothing romantic about tents. It’s poverty’. Indeed, the curator and writer Övül Ö. Durmuşoğlu has drawn a connection between Yalter’s focus on migration and her ‘nomadic thinking between media, disciplines, communities, cultures and cities […]. In her constant artistic cross-questioning of establishment, power and authority, Yalter always finds a way to float with her roots’.⁵ While in Niğde, Yalter was struck by the fact that so many women spoke of male family members who had ended up in big city slums in Turkey before moving onto Germany or elsewhere in Europe as economic migrant workers. These stories sowed the seeds for several bodies of work, which culminated in Exile is a Hard Job (1983–ongoing), an ephemeral poster project that explores the challenging experience of being an immigrant ostracised in a foreign country.

Somewhat surprisingly, Adriano Pedrosa’s exhibition Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere at the 60th Venice Biennale is the first time that Topak Ev has been presented alongside Exile is a Hard Job. Installed in the Central Pavilion at the Giardini FIG.6, the two installations form a large-scale immersive space that honours the migrant experience. The walls surrounding Topak Ev are covered with black-and-white figurative photographs, and the room is filled with the voices of Turkish migrants living on the outskirts of Paris, speaking in interviews that are screened on small monitors FIG.7. The words ‘Exile is a Hard Job’ – a phrase drawn from a poem by Nâzım Hikmet – are translated into various languages and affixed to the wallpaper in large, red capital letters FIG.8. Upon close inspection, it becomes apparent that the photographs carry erasures and redactions: some are bleached out, as though Yalter has captured the seeping away of her subjects’ identities. In other images, faces are entirely obscured or reduced to white smudges, resembling ghosts who haunt their own living rooms. As Yalter has noted of her sitters: ‘I realised that some of them were completely enclosed in the system, like a prison, and they were losing their identity, because at that moment the problems were housing, racism, not understanding the language’.⁶ Although Yalter’s practice relies on research and factual documentation, a strong poetic thread runs in tandem to her politics. For example, her work concerning migration has also incorporated bard poetry and folk music as a way of bridging communication gaps.

Yalter’s work concerning migration has received critical and scholarly attention but one project that has been overlooked until recently is the installation Le Chevalier d’Éon (1978), in which she turns her focus to complex questions of gender identity. This is in part due to the subject-matter, but also technological complications, as the Sony PortaPak system that she used to film it had been rendered largely obsolete by the 1980s. The video is titled after the eighteenth-century French diplomat, soldier and spy Charles d’Éon de Beaumont (1728–1810), sometimes known as the Chevalier d’Éon, who routinely dressed in women’s clothing and, from 1777, lived as a woman. Comprising video, photography and painting, Le Chevalier documents a man that Yalter was involved with as he experimented with gender transformation. Perhaps the first work of art from a Middle Eastern context to engage with transgender identity, this expanded portrait was first shown in the United Kingdom by Ab-Anbar Gallery, London, at Frieze Masters FIG.9.⁷ Forty years after its creation, it takes on a renewed resonance: ‘I’ve always made my most important work before it becomes interesting for the public, before its time’.

The central component of Le Chevalier is a thirteen-minute video, filmed in black and white and presented as a doubled image. Unable to create a split-screen effect with the equipment she had at the time, she instead turned to the rudimentary device of the mirror. Throughout the video, the unnamed subject alternately embodies a masculine identity, wearing a turtleneck and glasses, and a feminine one, putting on stockings, heels, a dress, fur coat, makeup and earrings FIG.10.⁸ Set to a Baroque composition by Domenico Scarlatti, the footage explores the subject from various perspectives, fluctuating between head and body shots; he variously stares directly into the camera, out towards the edge of the frame and inwards, confronting his other self. At points, the two images merge like a Rorschach inkblot and the distinction between bodies and gender markers blur. In a prolonged passage, the subject stands in profile, the backs of his mirrored heads touching, resembling Janus FIG.11. His face reappears on a monitor behind him, which is replicated like a hall of mirrors, evoking the endless multiplicity of the self and the endless quest for self-realisation.  

In the final four minutes of the film, he is seen sprawled on the floor, the monitor now between his knees FIG.12. A pair of disembodied lips appears on the screen and delivers a quotation attributed to the Chevalier: ‘After having been an honest man, a diligent citizen, and a valiant soldier all my life, I triumph in being a woman and in being able to be cited forever amongst those many women who have demonstrated that the qualities and virtues, which men are so proud of, have not been denied to my sex’. At this point, the soundtrack becomes a jubilant song. In the final scene, footage on the doubled monitor shows the protagonist shaving a foam-covered torso. The screen is framed by a pair of hairless, incipient breasts – the result of his hormone treatment – marking a significant development in his transition to the female Chevalière.

Accompanying the video are nine large-format black-and-white photographs that fragment the subject’s body, focusing on his legs and torso, and two colour Polaroids that show him dressed in elegant, women’s clothing FIG.13. Two deep red paintings of rectangles FIG.14 complete the installation, recalling Yalter’s long-standing interest in Constructivism. The colour evokes blood, perhaps even menstruation, and yet is constrained to rigid, geometric forms. Shown among the photographs, the canvases seem to represent a new potentiality, replacing the figurative with an evocation of the bodily, and specificity with a universality. For the writer and curator Omar Kholeif, these works are allusions to Alexander Rodchenko’s Pure Red Colour (1921). By invoking this disavowal of representation ‘and in turn the figurative reproduction of bodies’, he writes, ‘Yalter proposes that gender is not only mutable, but that sexual identity begins from a point of abstraction that is consistently reformulated around felt experience, tendencies that evolve through the affecting possibility of encountering one’s self through life’.⁹

Progressive in its exploration of gender as a fluid negotiable entity, Le Chevalier d’Éon languished unseen for more than thirty years. After the decline of the PortaPak technology, the video component of the installation was not restored until the late 2000s, when the Biblioteque Nationale de France digitised the artist’s archives. The work was then first shown in a gallery context in 2012. The recent presentation of Le Chevalier at Frieze Masters confirms the work’s renewed pertinence and poignancy. Exile is a Hard Job has recently moved into the public realm too, being applied to exterior walls around the world as a guerrilla intervention, adapting the titular phrase to the native tongue of each location. The work has been met with differing receptions: ‘in Vienna, they tore the posters. And in Mumbai, they kept them very carefully; they really almost worshipped them’. These varied responses prove how germane the subjects are that she explores. Yalter has given permission for the work to continue even after her death, meaning that her considered and complex narratives of tolerance will persist across myriad cultures – a surreptitious, tenacious and necessary instrument in the battle against xenophobia and rising anti-immigrant sentiment.