The work produced by Nil Yalter since the 1970s combines the power of testimony with a wide-ranging critique of domination on many levels but specifically from women as workers and migrants. By showing these people´s lives, foregrounding their perspectives and giving them value by creating works with a strong aesthetics of both formal and simple but effective beauty, Nil Yalter contributed to a socio-aesthetic movement that offered an alternative vision of history of the working-class. A principle feature of these works was to highlight women´s role in poor and exploited communities and show the particular conditions of their work through testimonies that are very rare and often overlooked in accounts and artworks about working-class men or migrants. If the reception of this work, between art and documentary, was very controversial at the time, many contemporary artists are now using these types of schema (e.g. in France, Valerie Mréjen, Florence Lazar, Clarisse Hahn, etc.). In the period 1970-1980, filmmakers close to Turkish realism also produced films that dealt with the experience of immigration (Metin Erksan, Yilmaz Güney, Omer Kavur, etc.), as well as documentary and realist photographers, and separate to this, some feminist filmmakers´groups also analysed women´s situation at home and at work, often exploring the gap between realism and fantasy, or mixing utopian dreams with the concrete conditions of life. In this cultural landscape, Nil Yalter´s and her multiple partner´s work – that is artistic partners, political and cultural partners, sociologists, migrants and workers themselves – are often seen as forming part of an anthropological and aesthetic approach in which testimonies and reality was filmed and photographed and then combined with representations in other mediums such as drawings or texts to form installations. When collected together, Yalter´s works offer important insights into a history of the 1970s and 1980s lives and conditions of immigrants and workers which present a unique feminist perspective.
At the time of her arrival from Turkey to France in 1965, Nil Yalter (b. 1938) found that the abstract and geometrical paintings she was producing were completely at odds with the contemporary art shown in the Parisian art scene and at the same time she became aware of the richness of oriental civilization in Europeans´ eyes. During her brief return to Turkey in 1971, she began to recognise the repression of Turkish nomads´ lives, experiences and customs and started to develop a multimedia art form that critics now call “socio-criticism”. Nil Yalter´s practice develop into a collective one, in many artistic collaborations or collaborations with the political and cultural networks or communities that she questions and about which her videos, photographs, drawings and writings are made. Renewed interest in her work, a more sympathetic reception and a new diffusion of her works follow both the revaluation of her work of the 1970s and of women´s work conducted in art history(1), but this revaluation is rarely interested in artworks concerning immigration and labor, even though these subjects are central to today´s debates about globalisation and twenty-first century capitalism. Nil Yalter´s work which have engaged with these topics over two decades have therefore not yet been historicized and this was a task I began to undertake with the artist´s support(2). The late registration of her concerns as an artist is somewhat typical of French art history, which lags behind other historical and sociological disciplines, but also by comparison to issue that have animated the international contemporary art world in the last decade.
Women´s work, men´s work
Nil Yalter´s numerous projects since the 1970s have presented the lives and experiences of working women often linking these activities with their work in the domestic sphere. Each time, Nil Yalter includes gender perspectives by showing how men and women work separately in proscribed gender roles within the communities that they represent. Situated between documentary and aesthetics, this work reflects a whole section of migrants´, workers´ and women´s memory of the 1970s and 1980s – mostly in France, a memory that still remains largely unknown and about which I will mention some examples. During the first half of 1970s, Nil Yalter directed several projects that address specific experiences related to women and their dual culture as both women and immigrants (Le femme sans tête ou la danse du ventre; Paris, ville lumière, with Judy Blum; La Roquette, prison de femmes, with Nicole Croiset and Judy Blum), but also the separation of tasks between men and women (Topak Ev; Une experience d´art socio-écologique, Neuenkirchen). It is these last two projects I will analyse in greater details here.
Analysing separately how human activities remain gendered is an every present feature in Nil Yalter´s work after her first installation, Topak Ev (Tent), in 1973 at the Musée d´art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, which now belongs to the Santralistanbul Museum´s collection (Istanbul). The collages that accompany the tent consist of drawings, photocopies of photographs and writings. The tent was made on a metal structure covered with felt made of sheep wool on which painted sheep skins were hung and additional texts written. Following the discovery of the living conditions of Turkish nomads, Nil Yalter manufactured a nomad´s tent that represents their lives and their beliefs – threatened by the land appropriation of Turkish landowners who drove them out of their traditional homeland and forced them to wander. Build by women, it is a double symbol, of women´s lives confined in this space while men are engaged activities outdoor, but it simultaneously represents how nomads are freer than sedentary populations because of these tribal living conditions in Turkey. Topak Ev also introduced how the artistic process of Nil Yalter between art and documentary forms began to take shape alongside her ongoing concern for people who are economically, socially and politically discriminated against.
In 1975, in a project in Germany entitled Une expérience d´art socio-écologique, Neunkirchen (A socio-ecologist experience, Neuenkirchen), Yalter chose to look at the female-defined work of a cleaning woman in contrast to the work of another woman employee who milked the cows in Neuenkirchen. This was following by an examination of men´s preparation for a shooting festival at heart of a forthcoming celebration in this small town. Yalter said of this piece that she ´wanted to work with [her subject] on her activity: cleaning, by definition, is a “feminine” work. Then I wanted to see the preparations for the village celebration: a festival of shooting, whose origin dates back to 1844”(3). The different occupations in the final video and installation highlight contrasting gender roles and the violence taught exclusively to men, because the women were excluded from the shooting gallery. The project was carried out and exhibited in Neuenkirchen in Germany and then shown at the Museum of Modern Art of the City of Paris. The work came about because thirty artists had been invited by gallery owner Ruth Falazik and Franco-German Youth Office (OFAJ) to prepare a proposal which resulted in an exchange with Neuenkirchen´s population. All the artists employed photography, video and film, like the feminist artist Lea Lublin, who also interviewed local people and then played back their responses to them allowing them to distance themselves from their experiences. The installation proposed by Nil Yalter had two parts: three panels combining texts, drawings and photography depicting the daily work of Mrs Schmidt, an employee who milked cows and of Mrs Meisel, a cleaning woman, and of a man practicing shooting; a video also shows the activities of the last two. The photographs, realistic and minimal, show body parts accomplishing actions, while the drawings take up again certain details of clothing and tools, emphasizing essential means by this economy, in the analysis of gender and class perspectives that are recurring concerns for the artist. Texts describe the different peoples´ stories. Mrs Meisel and Mrs Schmidt both came from cities in Pomerania: Mrs Meisel had to flee in 1945 upon arrival of the Russian army in Gollnow, hometown, which then became a Polish city. The text describes different jobs undertaken by Mrs Meisel before becoming a housecleaner, her remuneration, the number of worked hours, her children and her aspirations. Mrs Schmidt was a maid before becoming an employee milking cows. Yalter´s drawings represent details of her clothing, of her tools to milk cows and of her environment. The panel devoted to the shooting features photographs of the party drumbeats, gunmen in the process of targeting and mental containers punctured by bullets, while the text indicates their names, their professions and the results of their shooting. In its contrasts, the work acts as a socio-aesthetic witness of some women´s and men´s activities in Neuenkirchen and of episodes and activities within German history.
The reception of this work was indeed controversial, because its aesthetics were overlooked by the politics with which the work engaged, often dismissing it as sociocriticism, sociological or ethno-critical art. Nil Yalter, however, deliberately uses ethnological methods for understanding human communities and their relation to the land, to their home, to the universe, to objects and rites in order to understand individuals´ practices, beliefs and symbolic relations to the world. From Topak Ev came the idea of meeting people living in slums, the source of another series of studies trying to understand the situation of these workers that Europe needs but despises. Ethnological criticism had joined forces with many consciousness-raising movements and political thought in relation to aesthetics, including theorists like Herbert Marcuse and Theodore Adorno from the Frankfurter Schule. It goes without saying that this type of work has fierce opponents, who believe it does not fall within the artistic field, and this has resulted in a difficult reception for the work and the reputation of the artist involved. Nil Yalter is interested in how people of a given population live in their situation and with their universe (or worldview) as well as how they can change them by their own consciousness-raising methods within their political struggles for recognition and representation. For Theodor Adorno, great processes of artistic creation have always been historically linked to those of social production, and he wrote in Théorie esthétique about “the double character of art as autonomy and social fact”(4). The links between substance and form are addressed in many discussions and symposia in the 1970s, and it is summed up by a quotation from Herbert Marcuse which demonstrates Yalter´s position: “A work of art is authentic of true not by virtue of its content (i.e. the “correct” representation of social conditions), nor by its “pure” form, but by the content having become form”(5).
Immigrant communities
In the second half of the 1970s, Nil Yalter pursuing ideas developed since 1974, directed several projects on specific immigrant communities : La communauté des travailleurs turcs à Paris(1976) and L´Immigration et la ville nouvelle (1979). These projects concentrate on the work, living conditions and political exile of largely Turkish and Portuguese immigrant communities in France, although Algerian and Chilean populations also feature. In the first project, two videotapes contain first the testimonies of men, which are contrasted with the experiences of women and children in such a way that Yalter succeeds in emphasizing again how two spheres of life coexist, divided by gender. Similarly, in the second project, women, men and children speak about their lives and their problems, their aspirations. La communauté des travailleurs turcs à Paris (Turkish workers´ community in Paris), realized with Nicole Croiset and two sociologists, was shown at the Paris Biennale in 1977. These testimonies on video of people in Corbeil-Essonne and Goussainville – Paris suburbs - and in Paris reflect on the “professional relationship between immigrants and host countries” and on issues relating to “social inclusion, the survival of customs and traditions, the perception and assimilation of values scales by new immigrants, the contributions and mutual influences of different lifestyles”(6). Accompanied by photographs and drawings, the videos show families in their living places although in the drawings their faces disappear in a way which highlights their feelings of exile and loss of identity. Men and women describe their problems: accidents, exiguous flats (one family lives in a caravan), homesickness, the “in-between” between an impossible return and a partial integration. Women express myths forged about France and the second video shows their domestic work, in the kitchen and with children, in a way which highlights their ignorance of their husbands´ life outside the home. These documents on immigrant women´s daily life are rare. The few existing films and videos which do exist are made by feminists. Women nevertheless represented 40% of the foreign population in 1975, arriving in France either as workers or to join their men abroad. Struggles of migrant workwomen or domestic workers have existed, but they left few traces and few personalities are visible - the book of Maria Arondo, Moi, la bonne (Me, the maid) in 1975 (7), could, for example, be linked with Nil Yalter´s interest in Mrs Meisel.
Similarly, the video L´ Immigration et la ville nouvelle (Immigration and new town), exhibited at the Cultural Center of Ris-Orangis, gives voice to immigrants, mainly Portuguese, who talk about their lives and their aspirations in their home in vast blocks of low-rise buildings Habitation à Loyer Modéré, (H.L.M.) which is the city council´s housing with reasonable rent in the Parisian suburbs of Ris-Orangis and La Grande Borne in Grigny. These documents, with the distance of time, say magnificently what life was like for immigrants in France in the 1970s, and the conditions that shaped the situation of what we now call “bedroom suburbs”. Indeed, the cutting up of the urban space into areas produced separate spaces for the identity of some foreigners emphasizes their role in the economy of host countries and demonstrates a form of integration in the labour market. In France, migration history is still not seen as belonging to French History, so we must attend to these migrant memories as a counter to their absence from the dominant French story. Algerians also provided the music for this video, in a manner which demonstrates their presence but refuses to offer their testimony – the Algerian war was perhaps to close (1954-1962). The apartments´ decor, simple words and behaviour says a lot about these immigrants´ situation, and acts as a further visual expression of their suffering and struggle to forget their home country while integrating values of the host country. For example, a man unionized in CGT ( General Confederation of Workers) expresses his integration difficulties, his rejection of Portuguese customs and the acceptance and appreciation of his dual-culture. He explains that immigrants are scapegoats for the economic crisis and wrongly made responsible for unemployment. His wife expresses her sadness and anger in view of racism and says she feels unwanted. A young girl, in turn, recalls her desire to live in France, as a symbol of this second generation that will raise a protest movement in the 1980s. Nil Yalter not only gives voice to people who are rarely questioned or heard, but she makes their lives significant by her visualization of details in daily life, using simple artistic mediums that echo their poverty while magnifying their voices as individuals.
Characteristics of the particular French situation regarding immigration in the 1970s-1980s need to be clarified to relocate this work in context. France was welcomed immigrants since the Middle Ages, but the appeal to invited foreign labour intensified in the mid-nineteenth century, when most other European countries were still mass emigration countries. Immigration, far from being a marginal phenomenon, is rooted in the heart of the French social and economic system. After the Second World War, France developed a worker and resettlement policy for migrants and imposed a quota system. The repatriation of French Algerians also caused the number of immigrants to escalate in the 1950s-1960s. Between 1955 and 1965, 2 500 000 foreigners – all permanent employees – arrived in France. This population of workers were mostly Spaniards, Portuguese and North Africans. Following the oil crises, France formally blocked all immigrants in 1974 but in 1981, the Left permitted further migration within existing families. Today, it is estimated that one quarter or one third of the population living in France come from former immigrants of their grandparents´ generation. The pattern of immigration in France has also changed and largely European immigration has given way to a predominantly North African immigration. Thus, the number of immigrants from Portugal, Italy and Spain, which accounted for half of immigrants in the early 1980s has tailed away. By contrast, since 1980, those coming from North Africa and Turkey have increased by 68% among Moroccans, 13% among Algerians and 86% among Turks. The people chosen by Nil Yalter are therefore representative of European immigration in the 1970s and 1980s and not the predominant North African migrants of today. However, her interest in Turkish migrants is ahead of their real importance in France, highlighting the strong involvement of her own origin in her choices.
Domestic work, working class, illegal employment
In 1979 and 1980, some of Yalter´s projects started to question Oriental customs towards women and these works mix video and performance: Rahime, femme kurde de Turquie, Les Rituels (two projects done with Nicole Croiset) and Le Harem, and from 1980 Nil Yater undertakes projects directly in communities, like Femmes au foyer, femmes au travail in 1981 with Nicole Croiset, which consists of three parts. In 1983, she also exhibits in the contemporary section of the Museum of Modern Art of the City of Paris C´est un dur métier que l´exil I, that evokes the miserable working conditions of Turkish immigrants settled in ready-to-wear factories in the Parisian street, Rue du Faubourg Saint-Denis.
Femmes au foyer, femmes au travail (Women at household, women at work) includes a poster series, a video, a performance and a series portraits of women done in La Rochelle as part of a broader collective work entitled Femmes au travail, femme à la maison (Women at work, women at home) initiated by the District House of Mireuil. Nil Yalter and Nicole Croiset joined the project, supported by the Culture Centre and the Festival of Contemporary Art in La Rochelle, to record testimonies of ten working class women, two of whom were immigrants, reflecting their daily occupations: work, leisure and family. The collection of articles and stories illustrating the daily problems of women living in H.L.M. was developed into large posters made up of photographs and texts that replaced the commercial billboards along the route taken by the bus which took the same women interviewed daily to work. In the buses, small advertising panels were used to repeat key phrases or words from their stories of their lives. The artists thus formatted these women´s experiences, their fears and their joys, in an active collaboration. This city installation gave have visibility to these women as well as a very rewarding sight of themselves. Nil Yalter and Nicole Croiset also produced a performance that reflected the activities and journey to work in front of two white stretched sheets, where slides and video of women´s activities were projected, transforming everyday objects into powerful poetic evocations. The installation combined filmed fragments of reality with ritual actions performed by the artists. There was a reconstruction of the factory´s reality, of printing, of work´s world, which was superimposed on scenes from family life. These symbolic gestures reveal not only class and gender differentiation, but also their participation in maintaining a certain social order, including unpaid household work. Finally, with the recording about Turkish immigrant lives in France, they realized a video made of interviews with Turkish immigrants, both men and women, called Toprak (land), on Turkish community in Villeneuve-les-Salines, the second H.L.M. city in La Rochelle, which was shown on the spot in a bar where Turks were accustomed to meet. After making this work, Nil Yalter collaborated with several works councils, usually alongside a Communist delegate, realizing another form of collective testimony with women about their lives and translating this into political protest for changes in the work place. For the artist, this political, educational and sociological work corresponds to her desire to “Dial images and sounds like so many bits of reality shaped and anchored in interrogated workers´word and speech – To develop an aesthetic and artistic language as contribution to a work´s culture”. This socio-political approach was also developed by other women artists at the same time, such as the collective work on Mary Kelly, Margaret Harrison and Kay Hunt, Women and Work: A document on the division of labor in industry. This installation, completed in 1975 and now in the Tate Britain in London, consists of black and white photographs, charts, photocopied documents, film loops and audio recording. It documents the work of workers in a metal box factory at the time of the introduction of equal pay law. In the U.S., Suzanne Lacy´s work results also from the same approach.
In 1983, Nil Yalter created a further installation on exile, C´est un dur metier que l´exil I (Exile is a hard job I) that was shown and remade again in 2006 and 2009. The work brings together experiences from different backgrounds in one space – emphasizing the proximity of migrant experiences. The 1983 project title is borrowed from Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet (1902-1963), whose work provided a link between the artist and workers during meetings to develop the project. The Turkish workers are mostly illegal migrants working in ready-to-wear workshops in Rue du Faubourg Saint-Denis, Paris, whose deprivation and poverty serving the fashion industry are far from the subject of any fascination of political concern by the West. The work of the visual artist interleaved two worlds together, confronting the reality of these immigrant workers´ lives, their poverty, their loneliness and setting this against images from Turkish culture and their aspirations to work in Europe. The installation includes photographs, text and a video that represent living conditions of Turkish families who work in the same workshop and contains many expressions of their difficulties in adjusting to life in France as well as demonstrating their confinement, their lack of communication and their economic exploitation. Workers are often locked in these workshops which are not only enclosed spaces but also the site where they are exploited and exhausted through their labour. In the video, various symbols are used from Turkish culture to restore meaning to their stories and provide a means to generate distance, even to humanize their experiences. The red apple symbolizes, for example, a popular poetry that reminds you not to forget the bride back home. Nil Yalter juxtaposes myth with reality and imagination, enriching the cultural representations within a situation in which workers are removed from their family, their language or their country of birth. The worker´s testimonies refer to the regularization of paperless workers in 1981, to the family gathering that followed, to the risk of cancer from the durst generated by the fabrics they work with, their fear of the police, problems with language and housing, the pain of exile and their nostalgia for their country of origin. One woman evokes the double burden of work that women have in the workshop and at home. Politicized workers analyze their situation lucidly, nothing that French government took advantage of their youth. Another explains that “the bourgeoisie uses unemployment to reinforce racism against foreigners. …While the real reason of unemployment in France is the economic crisis.” Nancy Green, in her book on the ready-to-wear industry and its use of immigrant labour(8), explains very well the important place occupied by workers from the clothing industry in all engineering industries, stressing that the clothing industry may be a mass industry without any of the conventional methods of mass production. Nil Yalter´s installation provides access to these populations that are particularly representative of industrial change and her works examines the consequences of labour and migration laws on men and women´s live. Given the isolation of the artist in her studio, Nil Yalter tried, like many artist form 1960-1970s, to establish a dialogue with different audiences and argued strongly that artists within the establishment must participate in a fight against all forms of oppression.
Since the 1980s, Nil Yalter has continued to realize, alone and collectively, many other projects that include these issues and, like many artists from the 1970s, she has also recycled older works into new projects. She is also interested in digital media, creating in 2004 Diyarbakar, Mardin, an interactive DVD that gives voice to literacy network in Turkey. In this work, women and children, but also some men, explain the importance attached to learning to write and read, referring to the social violence that they suffer because of the “code of honor”. The artistic treatment magnifies these stories without depriving them of their harshness and contributes to knowledge by crossing feminist, Marxist and post-colonialist thought. Located at the crossroads of several crucial issues for understanding our era – the socio-economic, political and cultural conditions of women, migrants and workers – the artistic work of Nil Yalter is interesting, beyond art history´s current preoccupations, for its memory of underrepresented populations in their own universe and through their own words. Testimonies of these women and men are inserted into an aesthetic vision that elevates them without removing the viewer´s perception of the harshness of their conditions or an understanding of how the artist´s political beliefs interlock with her aesthetics. Using elements of everyday work and different forms to distance, analyse and reconstruct people´s live, this socio-critical art denounces the current state of affairs and at the same time gives voice and value to women, migrants and workers memories.
Fabienne Dumont lives and works in Paris and teaches at the University of Paris I/ Panthéon-Sorbonne. She edited the anthology, La rebellion du Deuxième sexe- L´histoire de l´art au crible des théories féministes anglo-américaines (1970-2000) (Dijon: Les presses du réel, 2010) and wrote recently “Danger! Artists working under feminist influence´ for Women Artists elle@centrepompidou (Paris: Centre Pompidou, 2009) pp. 314-317
Notes
1. I have, for example, done this work during my PhD, ended in September 2003 and publicily defended in March 2004, which dealt with Women, art and feminisms in France in the 1970s, a pioneering study of women artists´ collectives and the works of one hundred women artists: Femmes, art et féminismes en France dans les années 1970 (to be published by Le Presses Universitaires de Rennes). This research was innovative and necessary at that moment in France, but it is necessary to go further and not to content ourselves with what is done, but on the contrary integrate other particularly interesting directions on current events and history. It is significant that no research to date has yet mentioned Yalter´s work dealing with immigrant experiences in France and the conditions of working people
2. This project received a grant from the national artistic centre (CNAP)
3. Une expérience d´art socio-écologique, Neuenkirchen, 1975 (Paris. ARC, Musée d´Art Moderne de la Vielle de Paris, 1975) All translations are the author´s
4. T. Adorno. Théorie esthétique (1970) (Paris: Klincksieck, 1996) p.21
5. Herbert Marcuse The Aesthetic Dimension (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1979) p.8
6. Catalogue de la Biennale de Paris, 1977, p.144
7. Maria Arondo Moi, la bonne (Me, the Maid) (Paris: Stock, 1975)
8. Ready-to-Wear and Ready-to-Work: A Century of Industry and Immigrants in Paris and New York (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997)