Nil Yalter - OFF THE RECORD

Titled „Off the Record“ and curated by Eda Bremen the exhibition offers an thematic overview of Yalter’s hybrid installations that combine painting, photography, writing, collage, performance, and video. Walter’s work explores individual’s strategies for survival in the face of society’s control mechanisms and norms, focusing on omitted facts, invisible people, enclosed places and repressed emotions. The exhibition title refers to these subjects that are denied a place in official histories.

With an acute awareness of the way space, bodies and knowledge are manipulated by authorities to maintain control over the masses, Yalter looks to the margins. She documents the struggles and dwellings of the unseen members of society: the laborers, women and immigrants. In her research, Yalter brings together diverse disciplines such as folk tradition, literature, ethnology, natural sciences and philosophy. She creates a unique visual language that fuses fact and fiction, as well as documentary, poetry and performance. Just as a shaman inhabits other realms and bodies during trance, Yalter leaves the confines of identity to deal with personal and collective trauma.

As a marxist-feminist and an immigrant herself, Yalter focuses extensively on the subject of immigration. She documents the struggles of migrant workers, through objects, visuals and video interviews that she collected using ethnographic methods. „Off the Record“ brings together a selection of works from the artist’s „Temporary Dwellings“ (1974-1976), „Immigrants“ (1976-2016) and „Exile is a Hard Job“ (1983) series that are chosen for the context of Istanbul and specificities of the exhibition space. Beyond their significance as historical documents, these works are also flexible, permeable, and multilingual fictional spaces that allow the audience to observe different points of view.