In 1983, Nil Yalter accepted an invitation from Suzanne Pagé and Dany Boch to put on her second exhibition at the ARC–Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. [1] She designed a large-scale installation on the theme of exile featuring interconnected components in dialogue with one another. [2] Four monitors, stacked two by two in a cube formation, show videos of Turkish immigrant workers in France sharing their experiences alongside performance art and poetry readings. For each scene, a video and its slightly altered mirror version are inverted to create a kaleidoscopic effect. On the wall, Turkish and Kurdish folk poetry about exile, stenciled in colorful letters on cardboard, surround photographs in arrangements inspired by Turkish carpet patterns. This installation follows on from the “socio-critical” work [3] the artist began making in the early 1970s. An advocate for human rights and a critic of political repression, Yalter takes particular interest in the experiences of women, prisoners, immigrants, and laborers. She gathers materials (videos, photographs, texts, and objects) like an ethnographer, but approaches them like an artist, integrating them into a conceptual and visual practice that includes video experimentation, performance art, and the relationship between text and image.

For this project, Yalter sought out Turkish immigrant families working illegally at textile workshops in the Faubourg Saint-Denis district of Paris. After working with Portapak movie cameras since 1973, she opted for a U-matic on this occasion. She filmed their workplaces and living spaces as well as scenes featuring music and singing—this footage is shown in the video alongside one woman and several men telling their stories in their native language (interpreted in French in a second phase). They speak of harsh circumstances, dashed hopes, and homesickness, and the difficulty or impossibility of return. They share intimate and political reflections on family, work, health, money, housing, racism, assimilation, fear, exhaustion, forgetfulness, desires, and other topics. The attention paid to these unheard voices and their culture helps to dismantle stigmatizing narratives about immigration promoted by politicians and echoed by the media.

According to art historian Fabienne Dumont, these interviews “are subjected to constant visual effects: video images are overturned, inverted, duplicated, acted and performed, and fictive scenes are inserted, echoing the words and memories of the individuals which are also transcribed in texts and photographs, interweaving reality and beliefs.” [4] Through the correspondences—visual and poetic, formal and symbolic—woven between the installation’s various elements, the artist offers multiple perspectives on exile, an experience that is at once intimate, cultural, political, and social.

Julie Champion, June 2025

Translated by Elisabeth Lyman

[1] Suzanne Pagé, director of the ARC (Animation, Recherche et Confrontation department) at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris from 1973 to 1988, invited Yalter to present her first exhibition at this museum in 1973, showing her seminal piece Topak Ev (1973). Dany Bloch, a video-art specialist, joined the ARC in 1974 and played an active role in organizing the exhibition “C’est un dur métier que l’exil” in 1983.

[2] The work’s title is a line by poet and playwright Nâzim Hikmet, a prominent figure in twentieth-century Turkish literature. A Communist activist, he was imprisoned in Turkey on political grounds and subsequently lived in exile in Russia.

[3] The terms “socio-critical” and “ethnocritical” would later be used to describe Yalter’s work (by Joël Boutteville in 1982 and Pierre Gaudibert in 1987).

[4] Fabienne Dumont, Nil Yalter, exh. cat. (MAC VAL Musée d’Art Contemporain du Val-de-Marn.