Yalter’s first video work realized with the Port-a-Pak, Headless Woman or the Belly Dance shows the artist writing a passage from Rene Nelli’s Erotique et Civilization in a spiral around her bare belly to the accompaniment of belly-dancing music. The artist’s gesture references Anatolian fertility rituals in which women who fail to conceive are taken to the village imam, who writes prayers upon their exposed belly in a private ceremony. Embedded in this custom is the unspoken premise that a woman’s worth is contingent upon her reproductive capacity. Nelli’s text examines practices such as female circumcision not merely as forms of bodily mutilation but as instruments of ideological control, designed to sever women from autonomous desire and ensure their submission to a reproductive destiny. By inscribing Nelli’s text onto her own body, Yalter enacts a transgressive reversal, shifting inscription from a tool of patriarchal enforcement to an assertion of agency.

Headless Woman thus stages a protest against the subjugation and objectification of women. Characteristic of the feminist works of body and performance art of the early 1970s, the work operates a reversal of the male gaze and explores the idea of a woman’s gaze upon herself, framing her own image on her own terms. Yalter brings together ethnographic research and performance to subvert subject - object relationship through a reiteration of the exoticized and eroticized female identity.