Nora Turato – pool7
The ICA is home to Nora Turato’s personal project pool7, the artists first solo exhibition in the UK. In recent years, the Amsterdam-based Croatian artist has established herself as one of the most exciting new voices in contemporary art. Performance, writing, graphic design, video and sound, the exhibition features newly comminssioned work across the Lower Galleries and Concourse.
pool7 investigates our collective relationship to language and the everyday forms we rely on for communication and self-expression. Through bold installations and solo performances the artist mines this found language to expose the absurdities, ideologies and pleasures that characterise our communication today, like how the wellness industry is riddled in anxiety-ridden language. pool7 responds to the diminishing of language today, the growing distance between what is true and what feels reasonable due to sheer repetition or social norms.
Nora Turato, pool7, 2025. Image courtesy the artist.
“I am incredibly excited to bring pool7 to the ICA, an exhibition which proposes a new direction, introducing body and movement further throughout my work, as well as more original text. The ICA, a place steeped in history of experimentation and support of non-traditional art forms, has been the perfect catalyst and space to realise the next cycle in the “pool” series, a chapter that has been a long time in the making,” says Turato.
In a three-part installation of text, video and audio work, this exhibition debuts Turato’s latest text ‘pool’, seeing the artist increasingly incorporate her own original writing displayed alongside found texts on A4 sheets of paper. Short documentary videos feature Turato’s physical gestures, and her voice echoes in an audio installation. Throughout these works, Turato rejects the primacy of image-making in art while each element pulses with her characteristic wit, playfulness, and radical subversion.
Nora Turato, pool7 [text], 2025 (detail). Printed text on approx. 1,800 sheets of A4 paper. Photograph by Rob Harris.
Image courtesy the artist
In the final weeks of the programme, Turato will present a new performance to accompany the exhibition at the ICA. With this performance, the artist confronts a collective disembodiment, a cultural obsession with surface image that disregards the body and emotion. Cries, screams and sobs are incorporated alongside the artist’s original writing, tapping into reactions we suppress with age and conditionally reserve for exceptional pain, danger, grief or ecstasy.
Nora Turato, pool7: Logical Freeze, 2025 (still). Single-channel audio installation, approx. 15 min. Image courtesy the artist.
Nora Turato’s pool7 will be open at The Institute of Contemporary Arts, London until 8th June.