Nora Turato culls words, phrases, and sentences from both the private and public domain to incorporate into her work. Her sources include social media, films and books, song lyrics, conversations and text messages, her own thoughts, and even the text on commercial packaging.
Read MoreTurato refers to her archive of texts as a 'pool', which she renews annually, publishing the previous year's collection as a book. Ongoing since 2016, Turato's pool reflects the breadth of contemporary concerns as found on the Internet and in real life, and the breathtakingly fast pace at which people's interests jump from one topic to another. Pool also provides the material for Turato's performances of the same name.
Typically lasting around 20 minutes, Turato's performances comprise monologues, streams of seemingly random phrases, and babbling, encompassing the equally diverse topics of politics, millennial culture, and entertainment. Turato also varies her delivery, sometimes singing her words or almost spitting them out, all the while speaking loudly. The loudness confronts the traditional stigma attached to outspoken women, whose articulations in public have historically been dismissed as hysterical.
In her earlier performances, Turato became known for wearing designer clothes in response to the dominant tendency in contemporary performance art to assume a nonchalant persona. The artist has, however, increasingly performed in simpler clothes, as with the white tank top and a pair of pants for wow this huge wooden horse is great! at the International Centre of Graphic Arts in Ljubljana in November 2020. In an interview with Kaleidoscope, Turato said that the decision stemmed from the wider interest in her work, stating that 'the power of me wearing high fashion deflated, as people slowly knew what to expect.'
Drawing from her graphic design background, Turato often employs bold colours and the Helvetica typeface to transfer snippets from her archive to posters. For her solo exhibition Explained Away at Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein in 2019, the artist developed a typeface based on her cursive handwriting that contrasts with the orderliness of Helvetica.
