We are looking forward to viewing artist Nil Yalter’s very first solo exhibition at MOT International London. She was a founding member of the ‘Femme en Association/Women in Struggle’ when arriving at Paris from Turkey in 1965 and became a key figure in the feminist art movement. Her work engages with the themes of gender, displacement and cultural identity. As a migrant herself in the second half of the 20th century and therefore often documented the lives of different groups of immigrants and political exiles that she met through her contributions to worker’s unions and cultural organisations.
Visually, her work offers rich and poetic understandings of political unrest by embellishing the contexts of marginal histories, privileging narratives (that are often left unvoiced) with personal touches. Her drawings, photographs and videos paint a critical portrait of the spaces women occupy. Some of our favourite pieces features series of photographs depicting real people and places fixed below subtle illustrations that highlights the politics of disappearance through pastel colours and strong lines. We also love ‘Harem’ (1979), a video that focuses onto the body of a woman, cropped neck down and dressed in an elusive black body suit with a television set that appears to show a seductive woman’s lips placed in between the subject's open legs.
Nil Yalter: 6 February – 28 March 2015
MOT International Gallery, 72 New Bond St., 1st Fl., London
W1S 1RR
