La Femme sans tête ou la Danse du Ventre is a video that unflinchingly deals with female sexuality and questions religious credulity. Nil Yalter rallies to the feminist cause of the seventies and this work is representative of her commitment to these struggles.

The artist often integrates rituals, myths, and traditions into her work. On screen, we observes for twenty-four minutes, in black and white, the stomach of the artist in close-up. Only her stomach is present on screen, her face is off screen, the camera is static and framed at hip level: there is no head here, and hence no individual. 

With a black marker pen, Nil Yalter writes a passage from René Nelli's book Érotique et Civilisations all around her belly-button: "Women are both convex and concave. But we still must never deprive her in the slightest, mentally or physically, from the hub of her convexity: the clitoris [...]. This hatred of the clitoris actually corresponds to the ancestral horror that men have always felt for women's natural and virile component, that which, in women, conditions absolute orgasm."[1]

The framing chosen suits what the text formulates, evoking what is not seen on screen: the female sex organ and its history. According to the artist, in this video, it is a question of "neutralising the subconscious anxiety caused to men by the feminine abyss, in which they are always fearful of losing themselves through an excess of pleasure [2]". The text reflects both the pleasure that befits the sexual organ and the violence that it can sustain - here, excision. The act of writing on her stomach makes reference to a particular meaning: in Anatolia, up until quite recently, sterile or disobedient women were brought before the village imam so that the latter could inscribe prayers onto their stomachs: "The stomach then became a talisman [3] ".

In this video, the artist starts to perform a belly dance once her stomach has been covered with writing, to the rhythm of traditional Oriental music.
She reverses the symbolism of the Anatolian ritual by denouncing religious mutilations and denial of female pleasure. She stages a fictive ritual that borrows its codes from various cultures and recalls the tenuous links that exist between fertility and eroticism.

This video was exhibited for the first time in 1974 at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris.

Lou Svahn

[1] TEZKAN, Melis, Vidéo et identité: pratiques d'artistes au Brésil, en France et en Turquie, Paris, L'Harmattan, 2014. [Our translation]

[2] Nil Yalter interviewed by Esther Ferrer: "La Frontera entre la vida y el arte", Lapiz, n°60, Madrid, Spring 1989, p.32.

[3] TEZKAN, Melis, "Esthétique du nomadisme", Vidéo et identité: pratiques d'artistes au Brésil, en France et en Turquie, Paris, L'Harmattan, p 87.