At first encounter, Croatian-born Nora Turato’s solo exhibition pool7 at the ICA in London appears sparse, offering little of the spectacle we might expect from a contemporary installation. Entering the lower gallery, the environment feels stark, cold and clinical. Around 1,800 A4 sheets of white paper cover the walls in uniform tiles. The room feels like an empty swimming pool. On the sheets, in plain black Arial font, Turato has printed sporadic notes to self, fragments of overheard chatter and intimate overshares: ‘I’m looking to art to save me / can it’ she writes. ‘if u aint dirty / u aint here to party’, ‘girls just wanna have fun / no fun allowed it seems’. There is nothing mundane about this unfiltered, spiralling mass of language, brought together by a mind constantly processing and reacting to the world. In the room, I feel like I’m endlessly doom scrolling in slow-motion.
pool7 is the seventh iteration of Turato’s ongoing text-based work, a continuation of her pool series in which Turato creates yearly iterations of pools lined with collections of found language drawn from media, conversations, advertising, and online content. In the next room, the tone shifts dramatically. Lit only by a warm orange glow from a ceiling light, the space is fitted with plush carpets and cushions, with a nonsensical monologue playing out in jarring screams, unhinged sobs and guttural cries throughout the room. It's the kind of reaction we are taught to suppress, except in moments of extreme crisis, and the dissonance between comfort and unease is intentional. Sometimes we work to protect ourselves from feelings, but what happens when we do react? Turato allows us to recognise ourselves in the work, such as our habits of speech and concealing of emotion, though only from a safe distance. Whilst these themes resonate, they are largely filtered through Turato’s own voice, body, and perspective, and one wonders how the exhibition might have deepened had it opened itself up to other voices, experiences, or emotional registers.
Jarring screams, unhinged sobs and guttural cries
On the outside of the dark room, eight monitors line the corridor, each screen playing a series of performances by Turato. On one screen, her hand continuously twitches, on another she scratches her neck, on another she performs the habitual gesture of swiping a phone. The videos are silent and lmk uncut, looping and not in sync. It’s a performance of the body communicating beyond language, and in some ways, it’s louder than any voice. The exhibition doesn’t pretend to provide clarity or solutions to the collapse of coherence in our lives, nor does it need to. But, whilst the exhibition is attuned to our current cultural moment, it ultimately stops short of offering a perspective that feels particularly new or revelatory.
And why the swimming pool? I can't help thinking about Yorgos Lanthimos’s 2009 film Dogtooth, in which the eerie artificiality of the pool becomes a space where language loses its grip. The characters live in a world cut-off from society, and their lives are structured yet directionless. Turato’s text installation submerges visitors in a shallow pool of overstimulated thought, and in turn deals with a very contemporary crisis: the breakdown of clarity in a world saturated by fragmented speech, hyperconnectivity, and performative expression. pool7 isn’t about what’s happening in the content of our lives, or the world around us, rather pool7 looks at how we metabolise what’s happening.
