Nora Turato: eto ti na

Nora Turato is a young generation artist and an international art scene wunderkind of sorts. Her crafty and sharp work deals with language, its dissipation and the deflation of meaning in the age of post truth. What is particularly appealing in Turato’s practice, apart from its unbridled potency arising from her astute dexterity as a performer, is the immediacy of its material. Turato deals with language in an utterly irreverent way, mixing fragments from diverse sources, from advertising to science, mixing pop and high culture, utterly oblivious of their origin. Her work presents an entryway into the subconscious of digital-era humans: bombed by soundbites, slogans, PR spins and ad rhymes, it is a penetrating portrait of contemporary society’s face-value attitude to language in a raging war on truth and its means of distribution. The title of the exhibition, eto ti na, is symptomatic for Turato’s handling of language as material: it is an untranslated Croatian catchphrase, a sequence of sound rather than meaning, a linguistic ready-made with little regard to any context, making its way through a myriad of similar fragments, crashing and bouncing off them.

The eto ti na show will be one of Turato’s biggest museum exhibitions to date, featuring new commissions in the whole variety of media her practice covers, from multi-channel video installations, wall paintings, to graphic works, as a nod to the International Centre of Graphic Arts and its longstanding dedication to the graphic arts. While the essence of her work is performance-based, her video and 2D works are no less performative—Turato’s colourfully pulsating typographies scream their loud and flashy messages and are just as vehement and striking as the artist when she performs. Considering the fact her performances never entail documentation, her exhibitions are simultaneously sets, props, scripts and archives of her (performance) work. Such intertwining of media is just another of Turato’s ways of approaching the complex ways language is disseminated and the fecundity of that process. Different voices are echoed in her work, both literally, in high-pitched jingles, confessional stream of consciousness and the odd singing sequence of her videos and performances, as well as in the scribbles of her handwriting and the classical typographies of the visual communications she employs in her set ups.

eto ti na transforms the enfilade of the rooms of the International Centre of Graphic Arts into a labyrinth in which fragmented language sequences produce a hectic reality, a sort of linguistic landscape of today. Calling to the immersed visitor, defining a world that lacks essence or centre but possesses the incredible potentiality of myriad iterations, Turato’s show does what she does best: irreverently exposes our truths as hollow but makes no elegy of it. Post truth for Turato is just another way of saying that the fight for truth is on and that we are armed enough to join in the fight.

eto ti na is curated by Vladimir Vidmar. The show will open on September 11 with Turato’s performance wow this huge wooden horse is great, at 6pm and 8pm, repeated on Saturday, September 12, at 6pm.

Thanks to Galerie Gregor Staiger, Lambda Lambda Lambda and Frans Masereel Centrum.