ICA Patrons are pleased to invite Frieze 91 members to a Private View of pool7, the first solo presentation in the UK by Amsterdam-based artist Nora Turato (b. 1991, Zagreb). The show features a site-specific exhibition of newly commissioned work spanning performance, writing, graphic design, video and sound. In an enveloping installation that is the artist’s most personal to date, Turato investigates our collective relationship to language, exposing the ideologies, failures and pleasures that characterise communication today.
At yearly intervals, Turato creates text 'pools', collections of found language she gathers and samples from a range of sources such as media headlines, conversations with friends, books, advertising, overheard speech and online content. In this three-part installation and accompanying performance, Turato debuts her latest text ‘pool’, which incorporates the artist’s own writing to a new degree.
Turato’s bold, graphic installations and commanding solo performances have explored the anxiety-ridden language of the wellness industry, channelled a slippery salesman, and highlighted the disembodied voices of the internet and advertising. A sharp-sighted mirror, Turato's work deftly reveals the ineffable qualities of the zeitgeist.
The artist has been likened to “a glitching machine processing all this data” to “a medium – a possessed being”, yet with this exhibition she is not only a conduit but a living example. Text – the artist’s own original writing alongside found language – on A4 sheets of paper line the walls, short documentary videos feature the artist’s physical gestures, and her voice reverberates in an audio installation. Form and content are united in their direct address and utilitarianism. Throughout these works, Turato rejects the primacy of image-making in art while each element pulses with her characteristic wit, playfulness, and radical subversion.
In the final weeks of the programme, Turato will present a new performance to accompany the exhibition. In this work, the artist confronts a collective disembodiment, a cultural obsession with surface image that disregards the body and emotion. Cries, screams and sobs are incorporated alongside her original writing, tapping into reactions we suppress with age and conditionally reserve for exceptional pain, danger, grief or ecstasy. Here, the artist introduces an improvised way of shaping the performance, deviating from its script-based predecessors.
pool7 responds to the attenuation of language today, the growing distance between what is true and what feels reasonable due to sheer repetition or social norms. The exhibition operates in a rhetorical mode that pulls audiences into the same urgent, embodied, curious place the artist herself inhabits. It is a sincere attempt to locate meaning by a consummate trickster, yet fitting of a voracious researcher whose oeuvre has long appealed to common sense. With this exhibition, Turato offers herself up as example: as an artist who wholly lives her work.