Everywhere and Nowhere

Nil Yalter receives me in her apartment tucked behind the Champs-Élysées. She is wearing patent brogues, black leggings, and a denim kimono. She leads me to her small office, explaining that there is nowhere else to sit. The corridor is stacked with boxes. There are piles of books, printouts of catalogue texts, and interviews everywhere. She is moving soon, she says, to three different studios around Paris. This nomadic spirit has marked Yalter’s entire life. When she was 18, she walked from Istanbul to India performing pantomime. “It wasn’t traveling,” she says. “It was life.”

‍

Her work, too, is striking in its constant movement. Within a continuous change of artistic mediums—a fluid conversation between video, drawing, painting, sculpture, installation, and performance—Yalter has spent the past 50 years investigating lives and bodies in flux. Her monumental series “Exile Is a Hard Job,” 1983, a lyrical examination of migrant workers, is itself a project in movement. It has been pasted on the walls of different city streets, with local translations and faces. A new configuration of this work, alongside Topak Ev, Yalter’s 1973 installation of a nomad’s tent, will be exhibited at the 2024 Venice Biennale, where Yalter will be honored with the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement alongside Italian-born Brazilian artist Anna Maria Maiolino.

‍

The theme for this year’s Biennale, “Strangers Everywhere,” is fitting for Yalter’s oeuvre. She was born in Cairo in 1938 and came of age in Istanbul. In 1965, she moved to Paris, where she arrived as a stranger. Besides, she adds, “If you’re a woman, then you’re a stranger.” Yet the vantage point of the outsider has endowed her with a freedom to inhabit many places and identities. Since the ’70s, she has cataloged countless living spaces, from immigrant homes to a women’s prison.

I wonder about the places where she feels most at home—not just geographically, but intellectually. “I’m from everywhere and nowhere,” she says wryly, even though two of her native cities, Istanbul and Paris, feel increasingly foreign to her. What, then, are her anchors in life, the rituals of her day? “Does an evening drink count?” she laughs. She adds, now seriously, “making every piece is a ritual.”

‍

It’s better, she offers, that she shows me an old work. We spend some time browsing the multitude of files on her computer. Yalter, at 86, is more savvy than I am. (She is thought to be the first Turkish woman artist to work with video and has been a pioneer of computer-generated art.) She finally finds her 1992 work I Am. It is a manifesto composed of wall text and video. We listen to Yalter’s voice restlessly listing the languages and cultures embodied in a single life: “I am an artist. I am a Muslim from Bosnia, Herzegovina. I am a Jew from Salonika. I come from Turkey; I am from France. I am a Mongol, a nomad, an immigrant worker—exiled: I am the message. I am.”