The artist tells Dazed about her exhibition and performances at the ICA, and why she’s trying to reconnect with the ‘wisdom of the body’
Walking into Nora Turato’s solo show pool7 at London’s ICA, you can’t help but let your mind and gaze wander. The walls of the main gallery are covered with A4 sheets of white paper with unedited musings that read ‘thinking about fiona apple how much she meant to me’ and ‘haha ur not perfect dont worry ur not’. An essay published in ArtReview describes this work as entering the mind of someone with a flitting attention span, which feels apt as you traverse from one thought to the next, as your eye shifts to a different sheet of paper. The text, which could be read as the artist’s inner dialogue, is written in default sans-serif type and ranges from painfully relatable exhalations to poetic questions and sometimes feels a bit nonsensical, almost like an exasperated mind-dump.
In a conversation over Zoom, I ask the artist about this sense of exasperation. She shrugs it off. “As I was making this work and installing it in the gallery, I felt a bit crazy; it was really intense. But then the show opened and all the work was out there, and suddenly I didn’t feel it anymore,” Turato says. “When you make art to resolve something, and then when you’ve worked through it, but the work is still out there, it can be a bit strange. I still want to look into those feelings, but I guess I don’t feel as suffocated by it anymore.”
Turato’s frankness is refreshing and indicative of the work at the ICA, which, alongside the text-based series, includes an audio installation titled pool7: Logical Freeze and pool7 [video], a multi-channel video work split across eight screens. The audio is housed in an almost pitch-black room, and the artist’s voice repeats words in varying frequencies and speeds to invoke a sense of physicality, highlighting the nuances of how we communicate. In the videos, which are free of any post-production edits, the artist is seen rolling her neck forwards and backwards, opening her mouth as wide as she possibly can and shaking her arms, in an attempt to lean into what she refers to as the ‘waning wisdom of the body’. Ultimately, both works are trying to locate the embodied ways humans could communicate through speech and bodily movements if we were untethered to cultural norms. “There’s this theory that suggests how a very small percentage of human communication relies on words and how posture, tone and how our bodies move around in a space actually sends so much more of a message,” she explains, emphasising how this work is invested in seeing how words get filled through tone and energy.
Our reliance on theory is a bit ridiculous. Maybe it’s because we’re humans, we love to control situations and try to think our way out of uncomfortable situations, and I’m not against that, but I think it has to come with balance. We have to allow a sense of feeling
– Nora Turato
Compared to the artist’s previous work, pool7 is far more diaristic. In earlier pools, Turato would collect found text from news reports, literature, advertising and online content, sifting through and rearranging them to be published in book form, with select phrases used in large-scale installations and splashed across walls. This work, morphed into a time capsule of language, highlights the linguistic trends of late-stage capitalism and ever-changing digital speak. In pool7, she attempts to reclaim language and communication through audio recordings and unedited text. “In my practice, I’m starting to develop a relationship with myself, and I think that is feeding off why I unconsciously began making art in the first place, which was to figure out something lost,” Turato shares. “I’ve slowly got to the point where I feel like I can start to use language in a way that feels more like my language. With this pool, I felt more interested in what I had to say and not thinking about what the outside world is telling me.”
A lot of the work in pool7 and the upcoming performance in June, which Turato described as “putting all the chopped ingredients in the ICA together to make a dish”, is an honest attempt by the artist to divorce herself from theory. She adds that, while interested in audio psychology and how sound can be primordial, she doesn’t want her work to be guided by research. “I think what’s happening in the art world with our reliance on theory is a bit ridiculous. Maybe it’s because we’re humans, we love to control situations and try to think our way out of uncomfortable situations, and I’m not against that, but I think it has to come with balance. We have to allow a sense of feeling,“ Turato explains. ”A lot of shit can swim to the surface when we make art or write poetry but what theory does is repress that uncomfortability or make it easier to control. When we rely on it too much, we’re manufacturing art or illustrating something. As artists, are we even surprised by this work?”
This postmodern need to control everything through Excel sheets, meticulous digital calendars and even the architecture of 21st-century buildings is frustrating to the artist, and it calcifies in this work. “I think we need things with less fixated logic,” she remarks. In her performances next month, which will mark the conclusion of the show and this version of pool7, Turato hopes to discard this fixed state; instead, she wants to be surprised by what happens. “The performance will be very physical, almost like a speech and will have a lot of movement and singing. I’m making a script and rehearsing some aspects of it as I’m not ready to improvise yet, but I am allowing space for my body to take over and perform for me. When I perform, it’s almost like I am watching a movie of me performing, and I’m excited to see if something new starts happening that has never happened before, or if I hit a note I did not think I could hit. It’s all very exciting and every performance feels completely new.”
Nora Turato’s pool7 is at the ICA, London, until 8 June 2025, with two live performances on June 5 and 6.
Nora Turato: pool7, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, 8 April – 9 June, 2025. Video produced by Fergus Carmichael. Courtesy the artist and Institute of Contemporary Arts.