Dekoloniale x BB 22 »Still Present!«
As part of the 12th Berlin Biennale, the artwork Exile Is a Hard Job (1983/2022) by Nil Yalter will be exhibited from June 9 to September 18, 2022 in the Dekoloniale project space at Wilhelmstraße 92, 10117 Berlin.
Nil Yalter lives and works in Paris, FR. For over five decades, Nil Yalter has used the means of the Portapak video recorder or, more recently, the smartphone camera, photography, drawing, installation and writing as methods for what she considers a form of sociocritical research. Born in Cairo, the self-taught artist left Turkey, her family's country, in 1965. To this day, she lives in political exile. She places undocumented or mis- and underrepresented voices at the centre of her art, for example in the multi-part installation La Roquette, Prison de Femmes [La Roquette, Women's Prison, 1974–75], made with painter Judy Blum and video artist Nicole Croiset, which consists of a video, a transcript, drawings and photographs. We learn about the carceral sexism in the French prison-industrial complex through former inmate Mimi, who provided a self-recording for the work. Until 1974, the Paris prison La Petite Roquette was a state infrastructure in the center of a European capital for punishing women who demanded their rights over their bodies or fought against France's anti-communist regime during the Second World War or the global Cold War.
The work Exile Is a Hard Job [ Exil ist Härte Arbeit, 1983/2022] , which will be realized again in public space and in the exhibition during the 12th Berlin Biennale , also testifies to the artist's commitment to solidarity within intersectional struggles. The series, which was realized as a poster, among other things, is based on photographs, a quote and videotaped conversations with women and families from Portugal and Turkey. Her words confront "the metropolitan majority" (Nikita Dhawan) with the question of what it means to live in exile. This requires hard work every day to develop skills and knowledge that make it possible to survive the violence of silence and invisibility within a supposedly representative democracy. © Doreen Mende
Nil Yalter's artwork Exile Is a Hard Job (1983/2022) was installed on our windows as part of a poster workshop with Nagham Hammoush and Rüzgâr Buşki.
We look forward to your visit!
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