[6] The poster writes ″Şu Gurbetlik Zor Zanaat Zor″ in Turkish which has been translated as ″Exile is hard work″, aims to raise awareness of the situation of people in exile.
[4] In 1974, she created a video titled The Headless Woman (The Belly Dance), a piece that stands out in French contemporary art history as one of the early feminist-art classics.
The text is an excerpt from René Nelli's Erotique et Civilisations (1972) and states that "a woman's sexuality is both convex and concave", emphasizing the vaginal and clitoral orgasmic potentials of women.
[8] The work is emblematic of some of the formal gestures and critical strategies Yalter developed in the coming years: creating a reversal of the male gaze by objectifying her own body through the camera, Yalter refers to women's sexual liberation from patriarchal control, while at the same time commenting on the Orientalist eroticization of Middle Eastern women in Western art.
[4][8] Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Yalter created a series of works combining her interest in gender issues and feminism with a focus on marginalized communities such as migrant workers in Europe and former prisoners.
Temporary Dwellings, first exhibited in Grenoble, France, in 1977 investigates the living conditions and experiences of migrant workers as told by women.
[11][12] A video installation created in collaboration with Judy Blum and Nicole Croizet in 1974, La Roquette, Prison de Femmes reconstructs the living conditions in the Roquette women's prison in Paris with a video and series of photographs and drawings based on former inmate Mimi's memories related to daily rites and objects describing the experience of a panoptical space.
[13] Yalter was a member of several collectives of female artists in Paris in the 1970s, such as Femmes en Lutte and Femmes/Art which gathered around socially engaged practices and the women's struggle for visibility in the arts.
[5] In the 1990s, with the advent of digital technologies, Nil Yalter developed her video practice by using 3D animation techniques and electronic sound editing.
[16] In 2016, she had two retrospectives, "Off The Record" at Arter, Istanbul[17] and "Nil Yalter", Frac Lorraine, Metz,[18] and a monographic exhibition at La Verriere - Fondation Hermes,[19] Brussels, followed by "D'apres Stimmung" in 2017 at Ludwig Museum, Cologne.