Quaderni di Venezia Arti

Reading the Void: Nil Yalter’s Semiotics of the Body

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Abstract

This article examines Nil Yalter’s seminal work The Headless Woman or the Belly Dance (1974), reinterpreting the void not as a category of absence but as a semiotic strategy – a relational field in which body, text, and viewer converge. The analysis unfolds along three interrelated axes: erasure, latency, and potentiality. Yalter transforms her fragmented, headless body into a dynamic site of resistance and feminist self-inscription, destabilising the conventional gaze and opening new possibilities of meaning. Ultimately, the article demonstrates how the void operates as a performative and political force that actively reconfigures identity, turning absence into an act of emancipation.


Open access

Submitted: Oct. 15, 2025 | Published Dec. 15, 2025 | Language: en

Keywords Performance • Relational aesthetics • Void • Semiotics of the body • Feminist art • Video art • Nil Yalter

Copyright © 2025 Asia Benedetti. This is an open-access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction is permitted, provided that the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. The license allows for commercial use. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.


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