Nora Turato’s “pool7” is an elaborate attempt at an exorcism — of language, of self, and of what she repeatedly calls the “bullshit” of a culture that is possessed by dissociative, commodified performativity. Since 2017, Turato’s annual “pools” have reworked selected found texts — media headlines, ads, internet chatter — into performances, printed matter, and graphic installations. But “pool7,” her first UK solo exhibition, marks a turn inward. Drawing predominantly on personal writing, this newly commissioned body of work at the Institute of Contemporary Arts unfolds across three interlinked components — text, video, and sound — each articulating an approach to the same proposition: to unravel the politics, constraints, and ruptures of contemporary language through a methodology of radical subjectivity.
Entering the ICA’s Lower Gallery, the site-specific installation pool7 (2025) initially appears as a serene conceptual gesture: 1,800 sheets of white A4 paper are tiled along the walls, mirroring the scale and shape of an actual swimming pool. Printed across the pages are Turato’s diaristic writings from the past year, typed in default Arial font and structured with poetic cadence. Getting up close, this formal minimalism gives way to a flood of compulsive language confronting the lived tensions of late capitalist subjecthood: being a woman, an artist, a consumer, and a body. Anger, hope, hunger, humor, and despair pulse through voice memo–like rants on cultural inertia — “it’s the freeze in everything / in our bodies / in our cells / in our culture / in the air” — and poetic mantras: “HIDE / SEEK / SOOTHE.” A critical and self-reflexive thread runs throughout, on making art and surviving under capitalism: “fuck endurance art / I’ve endured enough,” she writes. “I need to make a living / and that means selling my work?” Technology, calendars, agendas — tools of bureaucratic optimization — appear as jarring mechanisms of control, disciplining unruly subjectivity into quantifiable systems: “ALL FUCKED BY THE EXCEL SHEET!”; “excel sheets rule the planet / did u know that?” Each statement is catchy, sexy, and quotable — fitting with the aesthetics of relatability familiar from viral meme- and ‘mood’ culture.
The aching, overworked body — “LOWER BACK PAIN,” “I’M SO SORE” — is ever-present, and entangled with language: “my jaw shook hands with my pelvis / TRUCE.” Desire and shame surface through internalized scripts of beauty and expectation: “im not so horny / im very hungry”; “i feel fat / ur not fat / ur just insecure.” A current of female rage courses throughout — at times diffuse, at others explicitly directed, both mundane and explosive. Cringiness and “too-muchness” becomes a politics of its own, and repetition a method of semantic erosion.
Declarative critique, existential unravelling, and blunt confession are interrupted by popular lyrics — “my hips don’t lie / shakira shakira” — which surface like glitches, evoking vestiges of Turato’s earlier found-text practice. These contribute to the work’s rhythm of oscillation between sincerity and sarcasm, vulnerability and strategic withdrawal. At times, this rhythm falters. Lines like “my soul doesn’t like ketamine” or “oat milk is a lie” slide into cliché and ironic posturing, their disaffection tethered to a specific register of cultural privilege. In these moments, Turato’s compulsive outpourings strike more as a stylized performance of access — indulgent self-exposure that privileges affective immediacy over sustained reflection, like much of contemporary online language. Anna Kornbluh’s notion of “immediacy style”1 resonates here, describing an increasingly ubiquitous mode of cultural expression shaped by the pressures of digital visibility, where content is expected to be constant, emotionally legible, and seemingly unmediated. Some of the exhibition’s most interesting moments emerge when this style is interrupted by more pared back, elliptical fragments — “pain is a hot potato”; “so god help me / for it’s slippery” — that resist saturation. These lines create space for ambiguity, inviting a slower, more reciprocal encounter that values interpretation over instant recognition.
In pool7: Logical Freeze (2025), written language is reabsorbed into the body. This fifteen-minute improvisational audio piece, in a darkened room off the main gallery, emerges from Turato’s research into vocal training and movement therapy, pushing her voice to its limits — trembling, gagging, choking, shifting pitch, or belting into hypnotic song. “I can’t speak. It’s freezing in here,” she mutters through chattering teeth, embodying an impasse in articulation shaped by an external, jarring, and ominous force — one that the entire exhibition seems to struggle against. The word “NO” is repeated until it sheds its semantics, dissolving into residue.
In the adjacent corridor, an eight-channel silent video installation presents isolated views of Turato’s face, hands, mouth, and limbs performing intense, compulsive, and seizure-like gestures — grimacing, stretching her mouth wide with her tongue out, frantic shaking —extending the text’s purgative logic into the body, which becomes a vessel for memory and habituated motion. As with the written and spoken components, this is not a choreographed performance but a physical methodology for release: an attempt to access what remains repressed or unspoken, and to reinhabit language.
Together, the three acts of “pool7” form a portrait of linguistic and bodily undoing, rendered with brutal, and at times discomfiting, honesty. It stages a confrontation with both the artist’s own practice to date, as well as language as ideological superstructure, pushing into its cracks — where speech stutters, loops, and falls apart. Through its restless compulsion to articulate, the show reframes breakdown not as failure but as resistance, and a way of inhabiting fragmentation. There is no closure, only the ongoing effort to speak through rupture, and the insistent possibility that new, embodied patterns of meaning might emerge through this persistence.
