In recent times, Nora Turato has established herself as probably the most thrilling new voices in up to date artwork. All through her work throughout efficiency, set up, graphic design, publishing and video, Turato investigates our collective relationship to language and the on a regular basis varieties we depend on for communication and self-expression. Introducing her work to UK audiences for the primary time, Turato’s exhibition follows notable exhibitions and performances at Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2024), Kunsthalle Vienna (2024), and Museum of Trendy Artwork, New York (2022). The artist returns to the ICA having beforehand carried out as a part of Picture Behaviour (2019), a season devoted to experiments in artists’ transferring picture.
At yearly intervals, Turato creates textual content ‘swimming pools’, collections of discovered language she gathers and samples from a variety of sources reminiscent of media headlines, conversations with pals, books, promoting, overheard speech and on-line content material. By way of daring, graphic installations and commanding solo performances the artist mines this discovered language to show the absurdities, ideologies and pleasures that characterise communication at this time. Turato has explored the anxiety-ridden language of the wellness business, channelled a slippery salesman, and highlighted the disembodied voices of the web and promoting. A pointy-sighted mirror, Turato’s work deftly reveals the ineffable qualities of the zeitgeist.
In a three-part set up of textual content, video and audio work, this exhibition debuts Turato’s newest textual content ‘pool’, seeing the artist more and more incorporate her personal unique writing alongside discovered language. Textual content on A4 sheets of paper line the partitions, quick documentary movies function the artist’s bodily gestures, and her voice reverberates in an audio set up. All through these works, Turato rejects the primacy of image-making in artwork whereas every factor pulses along with her attribute wit, playfulness, and radical subversion.
Within the closing weeks of the programme, Turato will current a brand new efficiency to accompany the exhibition on the ICA. With this efficiency, the artist confronts a collective disembodiment, a cultural obsession with floor picture that disregards the physique and emotion. Cries, screams and sobs are included alongside Turato’s unique writing, tapping into reactions we suppress with age and conditionally reserve for distinctive ache, hazard, grief or ecstasy. Right here, the artist introduces an improvised method of shaping her work, deviating from the script-based method utilized in earlier performances.
“pool7” responds to the attenuation of language at this time, the rising distance between what’s true and what feels cheap on account of sheer repetition or social norms. The exhibition operates in a rhetorical mode that pulls audiences into the identical pressing, embodied, curious place the artist herself inhabits. It’s a honest try and find that means by a consummate trickster, but becoming of a voracious researcher whose oeuvre has lengthy appealed to widespread sense. With this exhibition, Turato affords herself up for instance: as an artist who wholly lives her work.
“I’m extremely excited to convey pool7 to the ICA, an exhibition which proposes a new route, introducing physique and motion additional all through my work, as effectively as extra unique textual content. The ICA, a spot steeped in historical past of experimentation and assist of non-traditional artwork varieties, has been the proper catalyst and area to realise the subsequent cycle within the “pool” collection, a chapter that has been a very long time within the making.”
—Nora Turato
“The ICA, within the phrases of a founder Sir Herbert Learn, would “quite be regarded as a laboratory than as a museum…the place a brand new imaginative and prescient, a brand new consciousness is being developed.” Nora Turato’s exhibition is a becoming continuation of this immediate, as she hones and expands her apply to a spot of beneficiant discomfort, such that we recognise ourselves and this explicit second”’
—Andrea Nitsche-Krupp, ICA Exhibitions Curator
“We’re thrilled that Nora Turato will realise a significant new exhibition at ICA this spring. With works that command our consideration throughout completely different mediums, Nora’s exhibition varieties an intrinsic a part of the ICA’s programme this yr, as we forge connections between disciplines and proceed to embrace daring experimentation, and champion new and rising inventive expertise.”
—Bengi Ünsal, ICA Director
at ICA, London
till June 8, 2025
