Nora Turato “pool7” at ICA, London

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. 

“I am incredibly excited to bring pool7 to the ICA, an exhibition which proposes a  new direction, introducing body and movement further throughout my work, as  well as more original text. The ICA, a place steeped in history of experimentation  and support of non-traditional art forms, has been the perfect catalyst and space to  realise the next cycle in the “pool” series, a chapter that has been a long time in the  making.”
—Nora Turato

“The ICA, in the words of a founder Sir Herbert Read, would “rather be thought of as a laboratory than as a museum…where a new vision, a new consciousness is being evolved.” Nora Turato’s exhibition is a fitting continuation of this prompt, as she  hones and expands her practice to a place of generous discomfort, such that we  recognise ourselves and this particular moment”’ 
—Andrea Nitsche-Krupp, ICA Exhibitions Curator

“We are thrilled that Nora Turato will realise a major new exhibition at ICA this spring. With works that command our attention across different mediums, Nora’s  exhibition forms an intrinsic part of the ICA’s programme this year, as we forge  connections between disciplines and continue to embrace bold experimentation,  and champion new and emerging artistic talent.”
—Bengi Ünsal, ICA Director

at ICA, London
until June 8, 2025