Turkey’s prominent contemporary artist Nil Yalter has been awarded the Golden Lion for lifetime achievement by the Venice Biennale, along with Brazilian artist Anna Maria Maiolino. The award has been given for their enduring influence and significant contributions to contemporary art. Both artists celebrated at the 60th edition of the Biennale, titled “Foreigners Everywhere,” during the opening ceremony on April 20, 2024. Yalter received her award during the ceremony.
Yalter will debut at the Venice Biennale this year, presenting a reimagined edition of her installation “Exile Is a Hard Job,” alongside “Topak Ev.”
According to the statement of the Venice Biennale, “This decision is particularly meaningful given the title and framework of my Exhibition, focused as it is on artists who have traveled and migrated between North and South, Europe and beyond, and vice versa. In this sense, my choice rests upon two extraordinary, pioneering women artists who are also migrants and who embody in many ways the spirit of Stranieri Ovunque—Foreigners Everywhere: Anna Maria Maiolino (Scalea, Italy, 1942, lives in São Paulo, Brazil), who migrated from Italy to South America, first to Venezuela and later to Brazil, where she lives today; Nil Yalter (Cairo, Egypt, 1938, lives in Paris, France), a Turkish who migrated from Cairo to Istanbul and finally to Paris, where she is based.”
The artist is participating at the Biennale Arte for the first time in 2024: Maiolino will present a new large-scale work that continues and unfolds her series of sculptures and installations in clay; Yalter will showcase a new reconfiguration of her innovative installation Exile is a hard job in conjunction with her iconic Topak Ev work, placed in the first room of the Central Pavilion at the Giardini.
Installation with leather, felt, paint and metal
250 x 300 cm
Copyright The Artist
About Nil Yalter
A pioneer in the French feminist art movement of the 1970s, Nil Yalter (b. 1938, Cairo) was educated at Robert College, the prestigious American secondary educational institution in Istanbul. While she was engaged in dance, theatre, 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 counterculture 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 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.
Her works are part of institutional collections such as the Tate Modern, the Centre Pompidou, the Ludwig Museum, the Long Beach Museum, Istanbul Modern and Fonds National d’Art among others, as well as private collections such as the Art Collection Telecom, Colección Olor Visual, Reydan Weiss Collection and Fundación Foto Colectania. She has participated the 10th Gwangju Biennial in 2014, the 15th Sharjah Biennial in 2023, the 13th Istanbul Biennial in 2013 and the 60th Venice Biennale in 2024. Among her most recent solo exhibitions stand out examples such the ones at the Museum Ludwig, the MAC-VAL and the Hessel Museum of Art in 2019, the FRAC Lorraine and the ARTER Istanbul in 2016, and the ones at the Centre Pompidou in 2012 and 2010. Her work has been part of group exhibitions at the MoMa New York in 2023, Palais de Beaux-Arts in 2018, the WIELS. The Absent Museum in 2017, the Tate Modern in 2016, the Centre Pompidou in 2013 and 2009, the Long Beach Museum in 2011, the PS1 MOMA in 2008 and the CGAC in Santiago de Compostela in 2007, among many others.
