My Earl Grey still steaming in my hands, eyes barely open in front of my laptop, I read, last Sunday (May 18), an email from Nil — a gentle invitation to a roundtable she would take part in on May 24 at The Pill Gallery.
It’s precisely there, at The Pill, that Skin Story, a solo exhibition by Nil Yalter, is currently on view until May 31. I had the chance to attend the opening (did I ever tell you about it?). I was thrilled — and genuinely moved — to encounter several of Nil’s emblematic works, some of which I was finally seeing in person for the first time. La Chora (1993), Pink Tension (1969), Hommage au Marquis de Sade (1989), pieces I had only known through the cold, flat, overly pixelated surfaces of my screen… A world apart from the embodied experience of installation.
With May 24 clearly marked in my calendar, I made my way to The Pill that grey yet warm afternoon. In a room of about thirty people, I found myself facing Nil Yalter, Françoise Parfait (artist and professor emerita in arts and media at Paris 1), Melis Tezkan (a Paris-based artist who has collaborated with Nil for over a decade on films, exhibitions, and performances), and Aslı Seven (curator, researcher, and writer).
Delighted by the richness of the discussion, which unfolded over two hours, I wanted to take a moment here to reflect on a few moments that stayed with me.
Perched on my stool, I watched Nil Yalter — slight in her chair, her gaze alert, roaming the room, settling on faces and corners — sometimes grave, sometimes distant, dreamlike. The event opened with the screening of a short film titled with Nil, directed by Melis Tezkan. Shot in 2019 during a train ride from Paris to Cologne for Nil’s retrospective at the Ludwig Museum, the film is more than just a document of transition. It’s a quiet act of witnessing. Melis captures fragments of their conversation, suspended moments, silences, asides, and opens up the gentle intimacy of their compartment.
For about twenty minutes, Nil and Melis speak. It happens in a rhythm both ordinary and profound, about themes that have spanned decades and still echo in the private conversations of women of all ages: marriage, menopause, heteronormativity, the myths of the nuclear family, the pressure to have children, financial independence, maternal legacies…
True to herself, Nil speaks as a feminist — unapologetic, unfiltered, unsimplified. For over fifty years, she has dissected social structures, revealing their blind spots, dialectics, fractures, and contradictions.
I found the film deeply affecting. Those twenty-five minutes held me, my eyes locked on the screen. Free of artifice, it reveals a voice that feels spontaneous, sincere, unperformed. Nil and Melis speak plainly, without filter or staging, navigating complex subjects with a kind of grave lightness. One speaks, the other listens. And we, the audience, step into that space of trust — careful not to intrude.
From time to time, I glanced at Nil out of the corner of my eye: she was watching herself on screen, just slightly removed. She smiled, her hand to her mouth, amused, maybe a little shy. As if the Nil of 2019 had said something a bit too sharp — or a bit too true.
I should add: part of why I loved this film is simple. It takes place on a train. And trains, to me, are poetic time-spaces. Liminal zones (or moments?) par excellence, like mental chambers. They suspend us: we’re in motion, but not in action. The body moves without effort, almost without resistance. Maybe it’s this gliding that allows the mind to wander differently. More intuitively. Less rigidly. Ideas seem to circulate with more ease. They arrive fluidly, as if the rocking of the train invites a kind of fertile drift.
That’s exactly what Nil evokes. More than a short documentary, it’s a beautiful archive of Nil’s thoughts — and of friendship between the two women.