Nil Yalter, b.1938
Exile Is A Hard Job (3)
For over five decades, Nil Yalter has used a Portapak video recorder and, more recently, a smartphone camera, along with photographs, drawings, installations, and writings, to conduct sociocritical research. Born in Cairo and raised in Turkey, the self-taught artist immigrated to France in 1965, where she continues to live in political exile to this day. Her paradisciplinary approach places undocumented or misrepresented and underrepresented voices not only at the center of her art but also at the core of society.
Exile Is a Hard Job (1977/2015) consists of a wall-sized photo collage with the citation Exile is a Hard Job hand-painted in red gloss paint over the photo-installation. It was shown recently in Green On Red Gallery, once inside the gallery during their Refuge exhibition in 2021 and a number of times outside the gallery on Dublin’s city streets. It was also exhibited at Transfo Centre Culturel d’Emmaüs Solidarité, Paris, and during the Berlin Biennale in 2022. In this work, ‘the artist demonstrates her intersectional commitment to social justice, questioning what it means to live in exile—a task requiring challenging daily work to develop the skills and knowledge needed to survive the violence of silencing and invisibility within a supposedly representative democracy’ (Doreen Mende).
| Medium | Photocollage, Paint, 5 videos |
| Dimensions | Dimensions variable |
| Credit Line | IMMA Collection: Purchase, 2023 |
| Item Number | IMMA.4457 |
| Copyright |
Image © Nil Yalter | Photography: Silke Briel For copyright information, please contact the IMMA Collections team: [email protected]. |
| Tags |