LONDON.- The first solo exhibition in the UK by Amsterdam-based artist Nora Turato (b. 1991, Zagreb) is now open to the public. Taking place across The Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), Lower Galleries and Concourse, pool7 features a site-specific exhibition of newly commissioned work spanning performance, writing, graphic design, video and sound. With this exhibition, Turato introduces new experimental work in an ambitious project that is the artist’s most personal to date.
Today, The ICA, London also presents Nora Turato’s limited ‘Edition’ print with the proceeds directly supporting the ICA’s progressive programme, nurturing the development of fellow artists. Plus an ICA x Nora Turato sweatshirt, featuring the pool7 text “I GOT FUCKED BY THE EXCEL SHEET!”.
In recent years, Nora Turato has established herself as one of the most exciting new voices in contemporary art. Throughout her work across performance, installation, graphic design, publishing and video, Turato investigates our collective relationship to language and the everyday forms we rely on for communication and self-expression. Introducing her work to UK audiences for the first time, Turato’s exhibition follows notable exhibitions and performances at Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2024), Kunsthalle Vienna (2024), and Museum of Modern Art, New York (2022). The artist returns to the ICA having previously performed as part of Image Behaviour (2019), a season dedicated to experiments in artists’ moving image.
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. Through bold, graphic installations and commanding solo performances the artist mines this found language to expose the absurdities, ideologies and pleasures that characterise communication today. Turato has 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.
In a three-part installation of text, video and audio work, this exhibition debuts Turato’s latest text ‘pool’, seeing the artist increasingly incorporate her own original writing alongside found language. Text 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. 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 at the ICA. With this performance, 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 Turato’s 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 her work, deviating from the script-based approach used in previous performances.
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 an example: as an artist who wholly lives her work.
Nora Turato (b.1991 Zagreb, Croatia) is an artist based in Amsterdam, NL. The breadth of Turato’s work encompasses text-based installations, prints, books and performances, placing language as the central anchor of her practice. Turato’s work often weaves in collected language, as well as original text, channelling the constant stream of material into an original narrative she deconstructs and shapes through her multifaceted practice. Working within periodic cycles referred to as ‘pools’, Turato reflects on particular current cultural and societal tendencies, specifically, the language and zeitgeist that define these shifts. Turato’s series of artist books – also titled pools – accompany each cycle, with Turato likening them to ‘annual reports’ of the compiled text and language of that year.
Recent solo exhibitions include Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2024), Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna (2024), Sprüth Magers, Los Angeles (2024), Sprüth Magers, Berlin (2023), Museum of Modern Art, New York (2022), Secession, Vienna (2021), MGLC: International Centre of Graphic Arts, Ljubljana (2020), Sammlung Philara, Düsseldorf (2020), Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, Porto (2019), Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein (2019) and Beursschouwburg, Brussels (2019). Turato has participated in numerous group exhibitions at MUDAM, Luxembourg (2024), TANK, Shanghai (2023), Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen (2022), Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo (2022), Kunsthalle Basel, Basel (2021), amongst others. Turato unveiled a large-scale public art installation at Art on the Mart, Chicago in the spring of 2024. In 2023, Turato produced a commissioned performance for the Performa Biennial in New York.
