Nora Turato’s artistic material is language. Thus, her work encompasses the infinite terrain of words, be they rhymed and unrhymed, logical and illogical, clever and banal, be they assertions, slogans, or mere text fragments, a scrap from the news, or debris from social media. The artist is actually a performer, and in this genre she created a furor at the 2015 Venice Biennial. She crosses the border between art and life on a whim, and is interested in such rich and diverse topics as reading and swimming, Netflix, the Canadian sportswear line Lululemon, the human voice, the political situation in the Arctic, dogs, advertisements, cinema … In dramatic monologues, deeply embedded in the present day, she turns her obsessions to the audience. Her instruments are the smartphone and the laptop, and with them, she creates posters, large-format works in enamel, and murals made of text components from her performance scripts. The aesthetic of the works refers to design and usage patterns of graphic design, which Nora Turato combines with her own handwriting.

For the evn collection, the artist developed a wallpaper whose content refers to the now integral and indispensable hand movement of scrolling in daily life, (I'll just take my finger and scroll), and the importance of energy for machines and people (battery life and cameras). The initially enigmatic handwritten component of the wallpaper (suck on it, keeps saliva flowing) refers to the 1997 Canadian science fiction horror film Cube, in which six people, unknown to each other, meet in a maze of industrial cube-shaped rooms and try to escape from the Kafkaesque set. They suck on the buttons of their clothes to keep the flow of saliva going and thus suppress the feeling of hunger.

Brigitte Huck, 2019 (translation: Virginia Dellenbaugh)