ROMILLY SCHULTE reviews Nora Turato’s UK solo debut, pool7 at the ICA.
Nora Turato’s pool7, commissioned by and presented at the ICA, is a lesson in expression as purgation. The exhibition communicates communication. It expresses for the sake of it, nothing and everything. Site-specific to the ICA, you pass through two rooms then a corridor; the three spaces present the artist self-expressing; emoting, in writing, in noise, in movements of the body. It is ambitious in its array of media, spanning words, sound, video and performance. All circle back to Turato as individual, but speak to a coming up and out of the self. She mentions in a 2022 interview with Art Basel that she comes from a long line of tall, crazy women, and that she is the first to make a living off it. There is a sense of the larger than life in her work’s communication of a bursting-out of the contained self. She expounds freedom of expression with the volume turned up.
Turato had previously worked with the ICA in 2019 as a part of Moving Image, but pool7 is the seventh installment of her pool series and her first UK solo show, following her 2022 pool5 at the MoMA and pool6, her 2024 performance shown by the Art Institute of Chicago. Her works across exhibitions and media deal in self-expression and its appropriation into commodities through industries of wellness and self-improvement. Why are they telling us to keep a journal? Why should we “free” energetic tension stored in the hips? Where is all the shit going?
The main gallery is all white with walls covered floor-to-ceiling with tacked-on sheets of A4 printer paper, over a thousand of them. Each sheet displays words, phrases, paragraphs—all Turato has written over the past year. Sometimes they are coherent, sometimes notes-app stream-of-consciousness carved into stanzas; other times Turato gives us just one, brow-furrowing line. “Mickey Mouse can’t have sex”. The words have an automatic, free-associative quality to them, but recurrences come forth on circling the room. The text is impossible to digest in one sitting; each viewer comes away with whatever words have drawn their eye. Hip mobility, blockage, Marion Woodman, joints, shit and bullshit. Mass culture embodied in the unglamorous sense; Elvis rhymes with pelvis. Words of the zeitgeist are chewed up and spat back out. Annoyance at flat-packed, compartmentalized “wellness” prevails: “it’s not meal prep, it’s cooking”.
Words in pool7 are untethered to their usual social receptions. Turato seems to use them without apparent reflection on societal judgement. The show certainly throws quotation marks around what is “good” or what is “bad”. Each component of the exhibition went largely unplanned, made in a process of impulse and reaction following research into voice, expression and movement therapy. The back gallery plays an audio installation, pool7: Logical Freeze, which deals with the unconscious workings of speech. Words are used insofar as they serve to open the jaw and throat; they are uttered for their sound and the muscular torsions required to articulate them, rather than for their semantic value. Delivered at varied pitches, timbre and speeds, her voice is sometimes guttural, sometimes whispering.
Similar to her written work, her audio piece is coherency and noise all at once. At one point she truly coughs up her words, gags and all, before delivering a moribund “I am drowning in words”. We are made fully aware of the physicalities of voice, of the fact of its passing through diaphragm, throat, tongue, teeth. It is artless in a way; expression is stripped of poise and posturing. “It’s all shit”, she spits. An intimacy is certainly felt in the room; dark and warm with cushions on the floor where we all sit and listen to Turato’s verbal purgings.
Her work is entirely personal in the sense that it comes completely from her voice, her muscular tensions and her subconscious reactions to visual and bodily stimuli. In the main gallery, sheets of her written work go up two metres, allegedly “the extent of the artist’s comfortable reach”. Wall and paper serve, pragmatically, as a vehicle via which Turato conveys her work, but they too are touched by the very material, bodily individualism that imbues pool7.
“Everybody is reading, everybody’s looking, everybody sees these things, I’m not bringing anything new to the table; it’s just I’m the only one that stops and writes it down”, she says with Art Basel, “If I would move somewhere that might influence my work, who I hang out with influences my work. If I hang out with, I don’t know, a plastic surgeon or a nuclear scientist for a week, the work is gonna become a lot about that”. The artist is more of a receptacle here, or a body for processing internal and external influences. The work is individuated to Turato, but it tries to push outward to a place free of personal neurosis and blockage. It is an urging call to self-exposure.
The final component is a multi-channel video installation that shows Turato in varying stages of movement, shuffling and shaking her head and dragging her hands down her face. She is like a newsreel talking-head, but in a twitching refusal of proper posture. Body language as communicated by the thought-out posture of on-screen bodies is discarded in lieu of surrender to unconscious flinches of the nervous system.
At the end of the show’s run, Turato will give two live performances of pool7, culminating her exploration into capacities of physical expression. I imagine that this will tie up the deeply intimate ends that are so shamelessly exposed in her words, sounds and moving images. Pool7
is undeniably something to reckon with; it challenges the viewer with abrasive sound, with formlessness and agitation. Coughs, clenched jaws and shaking hands do not betray the closed off inner life so much as they delightfully illustrate personal idiosyncrasy. The path to freed-up expression on offer here is unsightly, but we are encouraged to do away with such aesthetic judgements. She confronts the restraints of aspirational posturing, positing instead a manic sort of respite in the base. Is this what liberation really is? Her work doesn’t look up per se, but it certainly looks out.
Featured image courtesy of the artist.