Nora Turato:
explained away – at Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein
Nora Turato scripts powerful narratives from text fragments gleaned from advertising, social media and everyday life. Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein is devoting the first comprehensive museum exhibition to the Amsterdam-based artist.
Turato defines language as the foundation of her work, from which she creates artworks in a variety of media. Her spoken-word performances garnered notice at the Venice Biennale in 2015, eliciting invitations from prominent museums. Turato’s performances confront the audience with a transformed reality, as the language she uses is the language of our everyday lives.
The artist uses her smartphone to explore the text hysteria that is circulating online. Fast-paced nonstop breaking news in adverts, in the press, literature, film, music and the social media. Honing in on specific content, she translates it into her script. She processes meaning, sound and the stylistic devices peculiar to the particular medium. She negotiates social roles and our relationship to consumer goods, political or cultural views. The constantly growing script serves as the basis for her performances, but also as a source for artist’s books, wall texts, works on paper, videos and audio works.
The phonetic, semantic and pictorial qualities of language fuse together in the exhibition. The focal relationship between image and text is flanked by gestures and embodiments in the performances. The spaces Turato creates consist of modular elements that incorporate art historical accomplishments of the 20th century and change with each performance.
An extensive exhibition folder can be downloaded here.
Nora Turato
explained away
22 February — 19 May 2019
with Hilti Art Foundation
Städtle 32
Vaduz, Liechtenstein
Courtesy of the artist and the Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein
Photography: Stefan Altenbruger