Language – in both spoken and written form – is the core material of Nora Turato’s practice. In wall pieces, videos, sound works, performances, and her artist book series pool, she works with found language from a wide range of sources – the internet, social media, news media, literature, films, music, and everyday conversations. This vast verbal surplus is meticulously reorganized and distilled to its essence, foregrounding social conditions, societal developments, and cultural phenomena that shape language and its use.

The pool series functions, in Turato’s words, as “annual reports.” Each of the seven cycles completed to date of gathered written and spoken texts informs her performances and appears simultaneously as a limited-edition artist’s publication. Whether delivered through expressive solo performances or manifested in large-scale typographic installations, her works offer precise observations of shifts in language and meaning in an era saturated with images and AI-generated content.

Turato’s new work they filled me up with words, conceived especially for the n.b.k. facade, marks a turning point in her practice. Originating in her latest cross-media cycle and the eponymous performance pool7, and serves as the cycle’s culmination. Here, the artist turns to her own body as a source of both spoken and written language. Years of “ingesting” countless found words are likened to the physiological acts of “devouring,” “digesting,” and “retching.” Turato examines the conditioning that shapes human behavior, focusing on how learned patterns become physically manifest. Handwriting appears not merely as a representation of language but as the direct result of internalized behavior. In contrast to typography, which seeks to replace the executing hand, the immediate gesture of handwriting connects the work to Turato’s performative practice, which lies at the heart of her art.

The solo performance pool7 by Nora Turato will be shown once in Berlin, after its presentations in London, Amsterdam, and Vienna.

Discourse Program

Tuesday, Oct 28, 2025, 7 pm

pool7

Performance by Nora Turato, followed by an artist talk at 8 pm with Lidiya Anastasova (curator, n.b.k.)

Venue: Uferstudios (Studio 1), Badstraße 41a, 13357 Berlin

Registration required

The work of Nora Turato (*1991 in Zagreb / Croatia, lives in Amsterdam) has been presented in numerous solo exhibitions, most recently at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), London (2025); Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2024); Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna (2024); Performa Biennial, New York (2023); Museum of Modern Art, New York (2022); Secession, Vienna (2021); Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, Porto (2019); Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein (2019). Her work has also been shown in group exhibitions at MUDAM, Luxembourg (2024); TANK, Shanghai (2023); Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen (2022).