Nil Yalter – Exile Is a Hard Job

“Exile is a hard job,” Nil Yalter quotes Nâzım Hikmet, a seminal figure of modern Turkish literature and an exile himself, in her eponymous intervention in public space. Plastered on the walls of urban neighbourhoods, this nomadic work of public art—on-going since 2012—has been hosted by several cities across the globe and features large-format posters with images of Yalter’s 1977 work Turkish Immigrants, painted over in bold red letters with Hikmet’s words. Written by hand and translated in a variety of languages used in the local context, the message is painted on the spot by the artist or her collaborators, thus becoming a shared, participatory action that claims agency over the migration experience and celebrates nomadic subjectivity. Most recently, in Cologne, this was the work that welcomed visitors upon entering Nil Yalter’s solo show in Museum Ludwig, eponymously titled Exile Is A Hard Job and her largest scale retrospective to date.

Curated by Rita Kersting, the exhibition spanned over fifty years of Nil Yalter’s pioneering feminist art practice, creating a sensitive and insightful dialogue between her early work—exercises in geometrical abstraction inspired by Kazimir Malevich, Sergei Poliakoff and Art Informel—and her later, more socially engaged and at the same time, radically experimental and intersectional approach that daringly makes use of diverse media, from photography, video and installation to computer animation, interactive CD-roms as well as drawings of minute precision and poetic detail.

Originally from Turkey, but born in Cairo and since 1965 living in Paris, Nil Yalter has been working as an artist since the late 1950’s, with several of her installations and video works, such as Topak Ev (1973) or The Headless Woman or The Belly Dance (1974), receiving critical international acclaim. Nevertheless, her practice has been sorely underrepresented in terms of larger scale institutional shows, therefore her retrospective in Cologne inevitably had to address—or at least respond to—her lack of visibility in the predominantly Eurocentric and male-dominated historiography of contemporary art.

The exhibition strikes a balance between a generous presentation of Yalter’s seminal works—from Topak Ev and The Headless Woman to the transgressive Le Chevalier d’Éon (1978) and the politically and personally significant Deniz Gezmiş (1972)¹ commemorating the left-wing revolutionary student leader who was sentenced to death and executed after the 1971 military coup in Turkey—alongside a carefully curated selection of the artist’s prolific and multi-faceted production on immigrant workers and marginalized urban communities, such as Temporary Dwellings (1974-77) and Turkish Immigrants (1977-2016). With its circular display of video works aptly titled Tower of Babel, the latter embodies the striking, non-hierarchical multi-perspectivity characteristic of Yalter’s approach. Across the screens, Turkish migrants in France and family members in Turkey give glimpses into their everyday lives, joys and struggles, which the artist skilfully interweaves with highly experimental, poetic shots of their home environments. We migrate not only in space, but also in time, as Nil Yalter constantly updates and re-actualizes her work, telling stories of nomadic lives from the seventies until today. These works strongly resonate with local histories of the North Rhine-Westphalia region, as well as the burning issues of our times, calling to mind the situation of guest workers in the once booming industries of the Ruhr area, while also commenting on the current, increasingly polarized debate on migration, racism and xenophobia across Europe, including Germany.

The show is complemented by works that have a particular connection to either the Museum Ludwig or the artist’s work in Germany. Part of the museum’s collection, D’APRES “STIMMUNG" (1973) is inspired by STIMMUNG (1968), a meditative, almost ritual choral work by the German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen, that Nil Yalter deconstructs from an unflinching feminist perspective. With a sharp eye for detail and a nuanced analytical approach—that should rightfully be seen as a pioneering precursor to contemporary research-based art—she examines the cultural and religious mythologies, the “magical names” and archaic deities evoked by Stockhausen—from the Roman god of war, Mars to the Chinese Chang-Ti, protector of women—in relation to contemporary society and formulates a complex critique of patriarchal systems that ranges from the history of religion to the weapon industry and violence against women.

Striking about D’APRES “STIMMUNG" as well as other works by Yalter from the period of the mid-seventies—such as Temporary Dwellings, Turkish Immigrants or Topak Ev—is how the artist combines analysis with aesthetics. Her Marxist feminist and therefore essentially materialist approach is not only manifested in theory, but also translated into artistic practice through the abundant use of materials, objects and colours in her installations. These underpin—materialize and spatialize—her train of thought, as she combines text with drawing and an almost ethnographic display of non-human ‘traces’ of the human and its environment, from bits and pieces of hair, textiles and shards to newspaper clippings, cumulating in the life-size reconstruction of a nomadic woman’s tent in her study of private, public and feminine spaces for Topak Ev. Her assemblages possess poetic detail and a peculiar aesthetic appeal, while all elements are placed with an acute awareness for how, in what constellation, they generate meaning. A complex ‘intermateriality’² is at work here that creates affective and sensual cartographies of critical thought and commentary. These testify not only to Yalter’s in-depth engagement with post-structuralist theory and feminist discourse of the time, but also to her interconnected approach to race, class and gender—manifest in both Turkish Immigrants and Temporary Dwellings, as well as later works, Rahime, Kurdish Woman from Turkey (1979) and Diyarbakir (2005)—with which she anticipates concepts, such as intersectionality (first coined by critical race scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989) and thinkers, such as the feminist theorist Rosi Braidotti and her work on nomadic subjects and the post-human.

Yalter’s manifesto-like poem Circular Rituals (1992)—also featured in the exhibition—unpacks the complexity, fragmentation and multiplicity of her own identity and clearly resonates with Braidotti’s notion of nomadic subjectivity conceptualized as a non-unitary subject. However, Braidotti argues that the nomadic subject should never be seen as a new metaphor for the human condition, but rather as “a cartographic tool that helps us compose materialistic mappings of situated, i.e. embedded and embodied, social positions in an age of global hybridity.” This is very much reflected in Yalter’s practice of creating complex cartographies, which offer artistic articulations of the “theoretically-based and politically-informed readings of the present” that Braidotti calls for.³

You have to be totally of your time to be able to survive it —surrealist writer and ethnographer Michel Leiris suggests. Encountering Nil Yalter’s work in Museum Ludwig, Leiris’ words echo in my head, although difficult to crack. They resonate with the attention that Yalter dedicates to observing, documenting and being-of her time as well as her facility in working across temporalities, interweaving past and present to create new connections and reveal continuities. In his essay on The Future, French anthropologist Marc Augé points out that being contemporary means concentrating on those things in the present that sketch something of the future: “It is only from a distance, starting from the observation that he is still present, that we can judge the pertinence of an author to his period and find something personally relevant in what he has managed to distil from the formless chaos of his reality.”⁴ Exile Is A Hard Job dialogues in many ways with both Leiris’ and Augé’s observations and introduces us to the practice of an artist who is present with a boldness and courage that is embodied in both the non-compromising aesthetics and the politics of her exhibited works.