This year’s Golden Lions for Lifetime Achievement will go to the Turkish artist, Nil Yalter and the Brazilian artist Anna Maria Maiolino. Awards desired by Adriano Pedrosa (curator of the 60th International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale) who saw in these two artists a full response to his theme “Stranieri Ovunque – Foreigners Everywhere”. And in fact Nil Yalter is of Turkish origin, but she was born in Cairo, she then moved to Istanbul and finally to Paris, where she currently resides, she and Anna Maria Maiolino, born in Italy, emigrated to South America as a child.
The two winners will be awarded on the opening day of the next Biennial on 20 April at Ca’ Giustinian.
We know the life, work and thoughts of Nil Yalter.
Born in Egypt to a Turkish family, Nil Yalter grew up in Istanbul where she taught herself to paint. In 1965 she moved to Paris and here she began her journey. Over the course of four decades, Nil Yalter’s artistic journey has taken her on foot to India and Iran, to left-wing uprisings in the Middle East, to field research with nomadic women in eastern Anatolia, and to undocumented migrants in Paris. Her itinerant work spans sculpture, film, activism, interactive media and painting.
The artist’s life is a predominant part of her art, the events of May 1968, the women’s liberation movement and another stay in Turkey in 1971, where she was shocked by the forced settlement of nomadic populations, and the meeting with l ethnologist Bernard Dupaigne were sources of inspiration for his work.
In fact, for his first solo exhibition at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, he built a nomad’s tent entitled Topak-ev “the yurt”, where drawings and writings on the external panels explained the living conditions of the nomadic populations in Türkiye. In an interview the artist talks about his work like this “I built the structure in aluminum and covered it with felt and sheepskin. I painted abstract shapes on the skins and sewed excerpts from Yaşar Kemal’s novel The Song of a Thousand Bulls, a hymn to the nomadic people of Anatolia, along with Velimir Khlebnikov’s futurist poetry about the itinerant peoples of the Kalmyk steppe.”
Among his most innovative works (we are talking about 1974), “La Femme sans tête ou la Danse du ventre” a video focused on the stomach of a belly dancer and on the mysterious writings that the protagonist draws on herself, linking the theme of sexual liberation to that of the objectification of Middle Eastern women.
In the same period he creates La Roquette, jail de femmes, with painter Judy Blum and video artist Nicole Croiset. The multimedia installation recreates the experiences of women prisoners through their stories.
With Haremstill a video performance, uses the medium in a more sophisticated way. La Roquette featured shots of moving lips and hands repeatedly passing and caressing mundane objects such as blankets, jugs or coats against the backdrop of the prison wall, Harem uses repetition within screens to disturbing effect. In the opening sequence Yalter places his hands on the monitor screen, showing a close-up of a female eye, reflected in two images of decreasing size. In another shot, the artist holds a monitor between her legs on which painted lips with teeth appear in a way that inevitably brings to mind the myth of the vagina dentata. Fragmented visions of eyes, lips, legs, feet and breasts appear prisoners, confined in their monitors, which blur in a disconcerting way between reality and representation.
Throughout the 1980s Nil Yalter continued to work on travel issues with a series of works on immigration and the working class that reflected his communist commitment to Croiset, such as Les Métiers de la mer.
Whatever the date of their creation, Nil Yalter’s works are striking for his keen eye in tune with still current themes, the condition of women, exile and the importance of place.
The video is an example Rahime, Kurdish Woman from Turkey, which tells of a minority, the Kurds, also ferociously repressed by the current Turkish government. The installation includes a series of drawings, a 55-minute video made in collaboration with Nicole Croiset, photographs and drawings, which also use subtle shades of mauve, yellow and jade to color doors, cushions, bedspreads and furniture and various pieces of clothing . Instead, the heads and limbs remain empty and fade into the background, equally devoid of color. Most strikingly, a dense mass of strips of fabric, dyed rusty red, protrudes from the center of a framed photographic ensemble. Mixed with tightly wound threads, these “bloody rags” allude to the honor killing of Rahime’s daughter by one of her relatives, narrated in the video, but also evoke Yalter’s broader interest in nomadic culture and rituals that works its way through his work.
“Exile Is a Hard Job”, a work in progress that began in 2012 with the posting of posters on the walls of Valencia, combines videos, photographs and objects to build a collage on the lives of migrant workers entrusted to the stories of women. The artist of Turkish origin was also the protagonist of one of the eighteen exhibitions that the French Ministry of Culture organized after the Islamist terrorist attacks culminating in the Bataclan massacre: 18 exhibitions that underlined the importance of art in reconstruction of a peaceful bond between cultures poisoned by religious fundamentalism and colonialism.
The recurring theme for Yalter is nomadism. A non-place, but a synthesis of all places, through which it reaffirms the meaning of a material place in the case of exiles, but also the importance of a place of freedom of gestures and thoughts, which society has the duty to protect for men and especially for women.
For the first time at the Biennale, Nil Yalter will present a reconfiguration of his innovative installation “Exile is a hard job”, together with his iconic work Topak-ev “the yurt”.
Tags: Nil Yalter Golden Lion Lifetime Achievement Biennale
