Contributor Bios

Nil Yalter

www.nilyalter.com

Born to a Turkish family in Egypt, in 1938, and based in Paris since 1965, Nil Yalter is a pioneering, free-thinking, highly original artist driven by her strong commitment to social and political activism. Her hybrid oeuvre combines painting, drawing, photography, video and collage, with performance and installation. Taking an essentially conceptual approach (but relinquishing neither form nor materiality) Nil Yalter has eschewed the artistic mainstream throughout her long career. She played a pivotal ’documentary’ role in the 1970s, exploring social, anthropological, and ethnographic issues and seeking to re-actualize the vernacular motifs of her native Turkish culture (artisanship, shamanism, magic and more) through their engagement with the foremost ideological issues and debates of the post-1968 era. Her work was included in the influential WACK! exhibition in the United States which traveled from the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art to the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC, the Museum of Modern Art PS1 galleries, and the Contemporary Art Center, Vancouver, Canada. Her sculptures, videos, and installations are in the permanent collections of the Tate Modern, the Istanbul Modern, Centre Pompidou and the Fonds National d’art Contemporain among others.

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