“For a multicultural guerrilla, new technologies form an alternative platform, an autonomous zone. By using new media in the field of art, by working on cultural topography, I process the body of the artist aging in a degenerating society. The body of the artist is a vector for social topics: digitization, virtual forms, words, hypertext, interaction... I am a female shaman on a knife’s edge. The surface I write my message on is my own skin. Just like a snake, I leave traces of my skin along the paths I traverse.”
Nil Yalter, interview with Rosemarie Martha Huhn, Contemporary Artists, 5. Edition, December 2001, St. James Press, issue 2, pp. 1857-1860
THE PILL proudly presents Nil Yalter’s solo exhibition “Skin Story” between 29 March – 10 May, 2025 in its new Paris location at 4 Place de Valois. Awarded Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement in the 60th Venice Biennial in 2024, Nil Yalter has devoted over four decades to an artistic practice that intersects migration, gender, and labor rights.
Taking its title from the eponymous interactive digital work, “Skin Story” (2002) and curated by Eda Berkmen, the exhibition brings together a selection of Yalter’s works realized between 1974 and 2008, some of which have not been exhibited since their production. Unraveling Nil Yalter’s deep engagement with body politics over several decades, the works on display situate the body as a domain of personal and artistic exploration, as well as an ideological battleground. “Skin Story” belongs to a series of interactive digital works created at the turn of the century. Focused on the process of aging of the human body, the work’s current exhibition process also opens up questions of technological obsolescence, through issues of conservation and conversion of new media works in our fast-paced technological environment. A series of drawings on paper from 1986 titled “Menopause” is exhibited for the first time ever, addressing one of the most universally shared and yet socially and medically marginalized transformations affecting the female body. Both works are emblematic of the artist’s contemplation of her own body as an everchanging material and vessel for creation, perception, representation, transformation and demise.
A leading figure of the feminist avant-garde, Yalter synthesizes a wide range of literary influences and employs daring, innovative strategies to challenge entrenched cultural preconceptions. She undermines moral and aesthetic boundaries imposed by patriarchal power structures such as politics, religion, or traditional Western art history. Calling upon seemingly disparate figures of cultural history; Marquis de Sade, Lord Byron and Kazimir Malevich, Yalter’s works reclaim desire and radicalism as tools for resistance, transgression, and challenge to authority.
Having experimented with video in the early 1970s and computer programming in the late 1980s as part of her artistic practice, Yalter is a pioneering figure in using new technologies in visual arts. The exhibition features, among others, her seminal video work “The Headless Woman or Belly Dance” (1974) and her first integration of digital coding and painting into video, “Hommage to Marquis de Sade” (1989) created for Le Havre Festival for the 200-year anniversary of the French Revolution. Highlighting the multiculturalism and intertextuality inherent to Yalter’s works, the exhibition thus presents an opportunity to observe the different ways in which the artist fuses and traverses between disparate mediums, as well as, disjointed temporal and spatial planes. The shamanic figure, embodying the power of metamorphosis, echoes throughout the exhibition—channeling nature, mythology, and ancestral wisdom.
