N°14 rue de seine - Nil Yalter
N°29 rue de seine - Jean Dieuzaide
In two places, two artists’ different perceptions, two generations, the Galerie Berthet-Aittouarès offers an evocation of Women in the second half of the 20th century.
At the beginning of the 50s, thanks to the boom of travel photography books editions, the photographer and humanist Jean Dieuzaide travelled through Spain, Portugal and Turkey. He brought back images of sacralised southern women, portrait of a woman attached to her village, part of a patriarchal family structure, usually dressed in black, carrying children and jars.
It's the gypsy woman from Sacro Monte, under Franco's occupation, eternal beauty, breastfeeding her child. At the same time, she is casting a proud glance beyond the barbed wire that encloses her. It is also the monolithic black silhouette that conceals all feminine forms and merges the jar on her head with her body.
With different investigations, the Turkish visual artist Nil Yalter imposed in the 70s a new vision of Women, marked by the events of May 68 in Paris. She joins feminist groups of artists and uses her work to claim women's independence. She doesn’t consider herself as a photographer, but the photographic medium is omnipresent in her work. In 1974 she produced her first performance video, The Headless Woman. She filmed herself doing an oriental dance during which she inscribed on her belly a text by René Nelli taken from Érotique et civilisation. She tries body writing, revealing a text that condemns female circumcision and celebrates clitoral pleasure to the rhythm of an oriental music.
Of this artwork, one edition is conserved at the Centre Georges Pompidou. The last one will be presented during this exhibition.
She adds to this battle the one about the homeless and immigration, issues that are still relevant nowadays. Photographs of Turkish immigrants in Paris, gypsies, the temporary homes - these are all subjects that illustrate the status of women in the Mediterranean society. These topics bring us back to the painful theme of exile on which Nil Yalter has been working on for years with the Exile is a Hard Job series.
She has been invited to the Venice Biennale 2024, where she will be installed at the Arsenale.
Galerie Berthet-Aittouarès
Since the opening of the gallery in 1986, Michèle Aittouarès and Odile Aittouarès-Inzerillo have made the same choices as they would for their personal collections and confront paintings, drawings, sculptures, photographs or videos.