Nil Yalter: Solo Exhibition
Green on Red Gallery, Dublin
★★★★★
Nil Yalter, who was awarded a prestigious Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at this year’s Venice Biennale, was born in Cairo to Turkish parents, moved to Istanbul as a child and then, in 1965, settled in Paris, where she has lived ever since.
Early in her career, some curators considered Yalter’s practice to be merely adjacent to art, better understood as amateur sociological research or political activism. Such rigidity is unthinkable today. Yalter, who is now 86, was a pioneer of multimedia art, preoccupied by issues such as displacement, immigration, feminism and sexuality. She was and is still part of the vanguard that shapes contemporary art.
Art Basel, the international fair, recently called Yalter’s Le Chevalier d’Eon, from 1978, the first artwork to explore trans issues in the Middle East. The Financial Times boldly refers to her as the first woman artist in France to work with video. It’s hard to prove either of these claims, but the mere fact they’re more than plausible shows Yalter’s influence on 20th-century avant-garde art.
Fortunately, before the Venice Biennale award intensified Yalter’s fame, Jerome O Drisceoil, the director of the Green on Red Gallery, in Dublin, struck up a relationship with the Turkish artist, exhibiting her work in a group show in 2021 and twice more in 2023. This new exhibition is Yalter’s debut solo show in Ireland, and its careful selection of works doesn’t disappoint.
Two installations confront the audience at the gallery’s entrance: Circular Rituals (1992) and Turkish Immigrants (Tower of Babel) (1977-2016).
The former is Yalter’s manifesto-like video loop proclaiming the diversity of her ethnic, national and religious background: “I am a Muslim from Bosnia Herzegovina / I am a Jew from Salonica / I am a Circassian from Russia … I come from Turkey, I am from France, I come from Byzantium.” As Yalter’s voice recounts the coexistence of her plural identities, dense, rapidly paced imagery shows us flashes of a feminist demonstration in Algeria and immigrant labour in Paris’s Sentier district.
The other installation includes footage of interviews with Turkish migrants about the economic and political challenges they face in 1970s Paris, alongside several series of Polaroid portraits undergoing a process of depersonalising abstraction.
The exhibition also includes one of Yalter’s most iconic videos: Headless Body/Belly Dance (1974). An unedited 23-minute shot, this feminist performance work involves the artist writing on her bare skin, starting with a spiral around her belly button, using text from René Nelli’s Érotique et Civilisations. The inscription begins, “La femme véritable est à la fois ‘convexe’ et ‘concave’” (“A real woman is at once ’convex’ and ‘concave’”). Once she is completely covered in text she dances to traditional Middle Eastern music, which serves to inject the work’s sexual politics with a strain of orientalist critique.
A fascinating review of one of the world’s heavyweight artists. Highly recommended.
Nil Yalter: Solo Exhibition is at Green on Red Gallery, Dublin, until January 31st, 2025
