On the afternoon of February 18, Nil Yalter called me to discuss the upcoming book for Archivorum. Usually, our conversations are brief—Nil is a woman of few words, and her time is precious. She gets straight to the point, and once everything has been said, the line cuts off quickly with a hurried goodbye. No frills. And that suits me perfectly.
But this time was different. We talked for almost thirty minutes. For defining a book—its content and its angle—you might think thirty minutes wouldn’t be enough. But with Nil, as pragmatic as she is, it was. Half an hour, and the concept was set.
My first question to her was simple: was there a book about her work she had always dreamed of making or intended to create? A silence, some hesitation. No precise answer, but an immediate desire—not about content, but about form. Nil wanted a carefully considered, deliberately crafted book that broke away from conventional formats. In simpler terms, she wanted a beautiful book. Noted.
From the outset, I knew what I didn’t want for this publication, and as usual, we were on the same page. Given the numerous books already written about Nil Yalter’s work, it seemed pointless to add yet another one retracing fifty years of career, listing each piece, and placing it in a broader historical and cultural context. Besides, we had to remain consistent with this past year of work on her archives. Perhaps that’s where the idea of materiality emerged.
Nil said – and I paraphrase – “There have been many books about my work, but few consider the materiality of my pieces—the materials I use, my brushes, my notebooks, my cameras.”
That was an interesting angle: matter. A book that wouldn’t just show but would dig into the very fabric of the work. A panorama of Nil’s work examined through the lens of materiality. Simple, effective, yet unprecedented.
She continued:
"Did you know, for example, that for my piece Deniz Gezmiş, I used Turkish butcher paper, the kind used to wrap meat?"
Yes, I knew it was butcher paper, but not especially the ones you find in Turkey, the city where she grew up. She then told me about Paris, Ville Lumière, the installation she created with Judy Blum, now part of the Carnavalet Museum’s collection. The fabric used? One of the cheapest, bought at the Marché Saint-Pierre in the 18e arrondissement. The general notion of “mixed media” or quick formal descriptions of her works we find online or in books hide or overlook information, and don’t encapsulate the full “social life” of Nil's materials.
Her markers, her jars of paint, her papers, her textiles—none of these are neutral elements. They carry weight. Historical, political—especially political, in Nil’s case. What does it mean to use butcher paper? Is it simply an economic constraint, a matter of supply? Or is it a gesture, a statement?
Materiality isn’t just about the physical properties of materials—their flexibility, rigidity, opacity, transparency. It is also a web of symbolic values. And I wish for this book to explore them.
But to speak of materiality is to immediately encounter its counterpart: immateriality. Nil told me about Orient Express, a work born from her 1976 journey from Paris to Istanbul. “People don’t often think about this, but drawing in a moving train isn’t easy. The train’s movement affects my body, my hand, my lines. That’s the immaterial acting upon the material.”
The moving body, the instability of the surface, the disrupted gesture—all these dimensions remain unseen but leave their imprint on the work.
And then there’s another kind of immateriality: that of digital images, which Nil has been working with for over thirty years.
So, obviously, materiality and immateriality are not opposites. They intersect, entangle. Nil herself put it clearly: as an artist, she embodies this synthesis. On one side, the tangible tools—papers, brushes, textiles. On the other, the intangible—concepts, theories, the intellectual framework of her work. If, as a researcher, I operate more in the realm of the immaterial, Nil, as a conceptual artist, stands at the threshold of both.
The next step? During our next meeting, we will identify the most relevant works to illustrate this approach—Topak Ev, for example, which was created using various textiles.
I will make sure to record all our discussions.
Since this phone call, I have immersed myself in numerous readings on materiality. In the second part of this blog (which I will publish in three weeks), I will offer a synthesis of my discoveries.
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