Nora Turato: Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!!!

Nora Turato’s site-specific intervention on the façade of the Meštrović Pavilion in Zagreb is on view until January 30. It marks both the artist’s largest public work realised in Europe to date and the culmination of her pool7 series. Conceived as a monumental inscription encircling the Pavilion, the work responded to the central theme of the 60th Zagreb Salon of Visual Arts, Choreography for the Finish Line, curated by the KUĆĆA collective, produced by Ivana Andabaka Vujičić, and organised by the Croatian Association of Fine Artists (HDLU). At the same time, it functions as a gesture of return: Turato’s first solo presentation in her birth city, Zagreb.

The intervention consists of a raw vocal expression—Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!!!—written along the rim of the Pavilion’s exterior scaffolding, which currently envelops the building during its comprehensive renovation (2025–26). Once a day, precisely at noon, the visual gesture is activated by sound: an audio recording of the same sustained vocalisation resonates across the square. Stripped of semantic meaning yet charged with affect, Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!!! operates as a universal human expression, evoking the origins of language, bodily reflex, urgency, release, and protest—a sound before words, and sometimes after them.

This work brings to a close a body of work that began a year earlier with a mural at Kunsthalle Wien and continued with the exhibition I Hear You, I Hear You at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. Across this trajectory, Turato focused on physical and performative modes of expression—voice, gesture, rhythm, and non-verbal communication—examining how language circulates, fragments, and collapses under contemporary social, political, and media pressures. In Zagreb, these concerns are intensified by the scale, architectural integration, and public nature of the site.

The circular form of the Meštrović Pavilion is integral to the intervention. As the text wraps around the building, it produces shifting visual encounters depending on the viewer’s position, while the daily sonic activation temporarily transforms the surrounding public space into an auditory field. Ritualistic in its repetition, the noon activation echoes the city’s temporal markers and embeds the work within everyday urban rhythms. Turato’s voice appears and disappears, asserting presence while resisting traditional monumentality.

The choice of site is inseparable from the Pavilion’s layered history. Designed by sculptor Ivan Meštrović and inaugurated in 1938 as the Home of Croatian Artists, the building is one of the key achievements of modern Croatian architecture. Conceived as a space for exhibition and artistic exchange, it was repeatedly repurposed in response to shifting political regimes—serving as a mosque during the Second World War and later as the Museum of the National Revolution. These transformations left enduring spatial and symbolic traces, turning the Pavilion into a palimpsest of ideology, power, and collective memory.

Returned to artists in the 1990s, the Pavilion subsequently functioned for decades as a shared institutional space. With the current comprehensive renovation, however, it is being fully restored—after 85 years—to its original purpose as a venue dedicated exclusively to contemporary visual art. Turato’s intervention was conceived to activate the building during the two-year renovation, underscoring that the Pavilion was built for artistic production and exhibitions and will continue to serve this role in the future.

Turato’s intervention engages the Pavilion’s history not through representation, but through affect. By placing an unfiltered human voice onto a building shaped by imposed narratives, the work reclaims the Pavilion as a space of openness, risk, and experimentation, affirming its ongoing commitment to contemporary artistic practice.

Language has long functioned in Turato’s work as a mirror of culture: fragmented, excessive, intimate, and unstable. Here, reduced to a single sustained sound, it becomes a shared human register that cuts across histories, institutions, and identities. Wrapped around the Meštrović Pavilion, Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!!! does not simply appear on the building; it resonates through it.

Nora Turato (born 1991 in Zagreb; raised in Rijeka; lives and works in Amsterdam) explores the instability of language and its performative nature. Drawing from articles, conversations, subtitles, and advertising slogans encountered in everyday life, she constructs visual-linguistic compositions through video works, installations, books, murals, and spoken-word performances. Her work brings political discourse and pop culture into direct coexistence, reflecting contemporary social dynamics and consumer mentality. Turato’s visual language is characterised by bold typography and an expressive handwritten style that evokes the intimacy of rehearsal notes or an artist’s sketchbook. She has exhibited internationally at institutions including the ICA London, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Kunsthalle Wien, MoMA New York, Centre Pompidou Paris, Mudam Luxembourg, Serralves Museum Porto, and Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein, among others.

Video. Organised by: Croatian Association of Fine Artists. / Supported by: Zagreb Tourist Board, City of Zagreb, Ministry of Culture of Croatia, Belina, Večernji list.