An art historian’s dream: to spend endless hours in conversation with the artist who haunts your research, free from the constraints of time, distance, or availability.
I have a mountain of questions for Nil. But since we can’t meet as often as I’d like – and more than 6,000 kilometers now separate us – my research on her work has mostly become what one might call indirect. I trace her voice through the web: scattered interviews, archived catalogues, digital trails. Each fragment enriching, or at least confirming, what I’ve already learned about her (from her) and her work.
Today, I want to write about one of Nil Yalter’s most emblematic works: Topak Ev.
If you were in Venice last year, you may have seen it standing proudly at the center of the Central Pavilion, surrounded by a “take-over” of Exile is a Hard Job, another of Yalter’s well-known works that has unfolded across multiple cities.
Almost exactly a year ago, on October 22, 2024, Nil Yalter appeared on Zoom in conversation with curator Övül Ö. Durmuşoğlu and artist-historian Jill H. Casid. The discussion – thankfully recorded and uploaded – allowed me to hear Nil speak about Topak Ev from an angle I had never considered before.
She began by recalling key contextual details about the work’s genesis. Topak Ev means “round house.” It is, as Nil puts it, a woman’s house – a Central Asian nomadic dwelling she encountered in 1973, during a trip prompted by her close friend, the anthropologist Bernard Dupaigne.
Light and adapted to nomadic life, these tents are built by women as soon as they reach the age of fourteen. Early on, they learn to master the construction of these dwellings, made from materials drawn from the surrounding fauna and flora: wood, reeds, white felt, goat hair, poplar, and more. Once married, their movements beyond this hand-sewn home are restricted—they can’t leave at will, and must remain nearby.
It is precisely this tension between protection and confinement that intrigues Nil Yalter: the tent as both cocoon and prison, a warm domestic space and a site of enclosure. This duality would stay with her and later become central in Prison de femmes, the project she developed with Judy Blum in 1974. “This yurt represents the dowry of the future wife, her prison as a married woman, and her sanctuary as a deceased one,” wrote Aline Dallier in 1975.
Beyond this dialectic of the feminine house-prison, Yalter also turned her gaze toward the men, whose life trajectories were strikingly different. During her three-day stay among the nomadic women of Anatolia, an important realization emerged: many of their male relatives—brothers, cousins, uncles, or fathers—had made the journey from tent to city. This spatial and social transition became another subject for Yalter to explore. Many of these men had emigrated to Germany or France as economic migrants.
Yalter’s endeavor, then, was to follow these men from the tent to the city—bringing her practice from Anatolia to Paris, where she documented the lives of Turkish migrant workers in the factories of rue Saint-Denis and the outskirts of the capital, Portapak camera in hand.
Seen through the lens of this trajectory – from Topak Ev to her later works on Turkish (and later Portuguese) economic migration – her words during that Zoom talk take on their full meaning: “The Beginning is the Tent.” To me, Topak Ev is emblematic because it marks a point of origin. Already in 1973, it crystallized the central themes that would define Nil Yalter’s practice: feminism, confinement, economic migration, and temporary dwellings. Even the materials, the thick, tactile felt reminiscent of animal hides, would continue to recur throughout her career.
The dense felt of Topak Ev, reminiscent of animal skin, foreshadows the tactile intensity of her later works. Its circular form, both open and enclosing, anticipates the immersive installations that will mark her career—spaces that are at once sensory and political. Perhaps all of Yalter’s work is an effort to reopen the tent – to let the air in, to make the boundaries breathable again.
Babs Haenen
Wonderful