“Fuck Language!” Nora Turato’s Pool7

It’s a balmy June evening in London. Outside the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), legions of camera-wielding tourists march through St. James’s Park on their way to Buckingham Palace from Horse Guards. But the mood inside the ICA is markedly different. The lights dim, the audience quietens, and Nora Turato appears. She cuts a nondescript figure on stage — barefoot and clad in a simple white collared dress. During the following forty-minute monologue, the artist dabbles in manifesto and madness, following an almost concerto-like structure of fragmentary pronouncements intermixed with unsettlingly jarring aural and gestural expressions. The performance script ranges from the banal slogans of the everyday (“Oatly! In Oatly We Trust!”) to the esoteric, with ruminations on becoming Mickey Mouse or doing ketamine on Mars (the latter presumably a thinly veiled dig at Elon Musk). To me, the phrase “performance art” inspires immediate shudders, perhaps a reaction to the cluttered landscape of gallery performances struggling to break out of Fluxus’s long shadow. Given that such happenings are all too often cringe at best and neurotically conceited at worst, it’s a relief to finally see something worth writing home about.