Galerie Hubert Winter

Nil Yalter
20. May – 25. June 2016
Früher einmal war die ganze Straße voll mit Cafés, Kinos, Reparaturwerkstätten, deren Reklameschilder noch zu erkennen sind. Eines von ihnen leuchtet wie ein wachsames Nachtlicht, umsonst.
Die letzten Zeilen. In: Patrick Modiano, Aus tiefstem Vergessen. Dt. von E. Edl. München, Hanser, 2000.

STIMMUNG premiered on December 9 1968 at the Maison de la Radio in Paris. Max Ernst happened to be in the audience. The score was written during February and March 1968 in a house on Long Island Sound in Madison, Connecticut (USA), where Karlheinz Stockhausen lived with his second wife Mary Bauermeister and their two kids. STIMMUNG develops a complete new vocal technique with certain overtones, the text contains magic names. A walk through soundscapes.

"STIMMUNG is certainly meditative music. Time is suspended. One listens to the interior of the sound, to the interior of the harmonic spectrum, to the interior of the vowel, TO THE INTERIOR. The most subtle fluctuations – rare outbursts -, all senses are alert and calm. In the beauty of the sensual shines the beauty of the eternal." (Karlheinz Stockhausen)

For the first time, Galerie Hubert Winter presents the entire series D’APRES "STIMMUNG" (1973) by Nil Yalter, created after a performance of the vocal piece in Paris 1973. Yalters’ unique approach of deconstruction and reassembling can be found once again in her 25-part work, based on Stockhausen’s sound work. The assemblages show an extraordinary sensibility, historical facts are incorporated and translated poetically. Names of gods from different cultures convey our cultural heritage. Based loosely on Feuerbach and Marx Yalter quotes in one of the panels: „CE N’EST PAS LA RELIGION QUI FAIT L’HOMME, MAIS C’EST L’HOMME QUI FAIT LA RELIGION“.
The search of identity in the 20th century is impossible to achieve through religion. Through her transcultural approach, her imagination, memory and loss Nil Yalter opens a complete new field for a discussion that transform the artist herself to a nomad by means of her reoccuring topics of sociology and migration.

Arriving in Paris 1965, Yalter produced abstract paintings inspired by architectural forms in the following years. Straight lines and shapes resemble her vision of a synthesis between the West and the East.

In 1992 she produced the video Les rites circulaires (Circular rituals) for the international multi-media project “Trans-Voices: French and American Artists Address a Changing World Order“. Commissioned by the American Center Paris, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Public Art Fund each of the art works were "urgent messages" about the political and sociological changes at the end of the 20th century.
Nil Yalter samples scenes of demonstrating Algerian women, footages of clandestine female workers in Paris and overlays them with digital, seemingly calligraphic montages of her paintings. A kaleidoscope of images and sound accompanied by a written self-portrait on the wall shows the complete range of her artistic interest: poetry, sociology, migration, anthropology, ethnology and the critical integration of these themes in her oeuvre.

Nil Yalter (*1938 in Cairo, Egypt)
The french-turkish artist lives and works in Paris.