Nora Turato’s video "has anyone tried unplugging it and plugging it back in? pool#3" (2019), makes her interest in the sharp and designed image clear. The work is part of a series of videos in which the scripts of her performances flash on the screen to the rhythm of her singing voice: ‘after crying, after food, after sex, out of love, loyalty, curiosity, kiss me, I haven’t had a cigarette in days, wow.”
In the video Turato brings an approximately twenty-five-minute tirade consisting of a conglomerate of reflections on micellar water, drones, memes and damned humanity. Just like her performances, her videos consist of collages of commercial slogans, internet language, private conversations, YouTube quotes and messages on social media. She constantly alternates between screaming and snarling on the one hand and manifest and decisive speaking on the other, between seriousness and irony. Armed with a modulating expressiveness and in a recitative style, she spits statements, ranging from a banal concept such as ’feels like the end of the world is near, is gallingly empty and passive aggressive’. They give an illusion or feminine empowerment but their empowerment is firm within the boundaries of beauty culture. “Lightning fast, but with great precision, Turato strings pieces of text together. It is remarkable that she transforms these text elements that explicitly aim at a short attention span into a tight composition with which she knows how to direct the attention of her audience flawlessly. The stubbornness of her argument continues to fascinate because she is constantly compromising between identification and criticism. Confirmation and invalidation are simultaneously present in her work: there is the appearance of self-expression, while her text consists solely of quotes.
Nora Turato (b. 1991 in Zagreb, Croatia) studied at Rietveld Academie as well as the Werkplaats (Amsterdam) and was a resident at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam (2017-18). Turato has recently exhibited and/or performed at Museum Serralves, Porto (2019); Beursschouwburg, Brussels (2019); Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein, Liechtenstein (2019); Bunkier Sztuki Contemporary Art Gallery, Krakow (2018); Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, Porto (2018); Bielefelder Kunstverein, Bielefeld (2018); mumok Vienna (2018); Metro Pictures, New York (2018); UKS, Oslo (2018); Manifesta 12, Palermo (2018); Vleeshal, Middelburg (2018); Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève (2017); 32. Biennial of Graphic Arts Ljubljana (2017); Bonner Kunstverein, Bonn (2017); Kunstverein Cologne, Cologne (2017); KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2017) and NAK, Aachen (2017), among others.