Nil Yalter

Egypt, 1938

Pioneer in the French feminist art movement of the 1970s. She was educated at Robert College, the prestigious American secondary educational institution in Istanbul. While she was engaged in dance, theater and painting during this time, she also practiced pantomime and traveled by foot to India as a pantomime artist, and later settled in Paris in 1965. Defined by the perspective of being a female immigrant, Yalter has generated an extensive body of work that orbits social aspects such as cultural identity, ethnicity, immigration and feminism and is characterized by its use of diverse media. Yalter, considered the author of the first interactive artwork from Turkey, has created numerous projects in which she has implicated her spectators and through photographs, documents, video art and performances has managed to make her message about the vulnerability of human rights in certain territories heard by a wide audience. 

She participated in the French counter culture and revolutionary political movement of the late 1960s, immersing herself in the debates around gender, migrant workers from Turkey, and other issues of the time. These social movements and ethnographic science have influenced the artist’s videos, performances and installations from the 1970s in the form of an idiosyncratic, pluralistic aesthetics. The influence of abstract traditions, especially that of Russian constructivism can be observed in her paintings and digital works since her early years. Nil Yalter’s works reflect a style that blends together all these influences along with autobiographical elements where the personal and the political intertwine. Nil Yalter is the recipient of the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement of the Venice Biennale 2024.

Represented by Galerist, Istanbul.