What Do Words Mean? A Zagreb-Born Artist Explores How Language Shapes Our Collective Unconscious

Zagreb-born artist Nora Turato transforms everyday fragments of speech and text into a mirror of our shared unconscious

Biography & Artistic Formation

Nora Turato was born in Zagreb in 1991 and grew up in Rijeka, alongside Croatia’s emergence as an independent nation following the breakup of Yugoslavia. Her early fascination with language was shaped by the influx of Western—and especially pop—culture into the country and its rapid adoption into the mainstream. As a teenager, she played in punk bands and produced music, which would later prove to be influential in her performance development and delivery.

Person with blurred face stands under a blue sky with scattered clouds, wearing a dark blue sweater. — Portrait of Nora Turato. El Hardwick

Following high school, Turato moved to the Netherlands in 2009 to study graphic design at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie and later at the Werkplaats Typografie—a path she once described as a “more pragmatic” choice than pursuing music. It was during her bachelor’s thesis that performance first entered her practice, sparked by a video project featuring her own voiceover. Turato later began to also foreground typography in her practice, investigating its "manipulative and seductive power" in shaping language.

Turato’s early performances dissected the cacophony of the internet, drawing heavily from social media and the online idioms that have steadily seeped into everyday speech. In her often half-hour monologues, she has embodied morally ambiguous salesmen, exposed the anxious undercurrents of the wellness and self-improvement industry, and confronted the enduring taboo surrounding the female voice in public.

Language as a Medium

Turato’s performances, and their scripts, often serve as the genesis of each of her pool cycles—a body of work which purposely draws from the immediate, as a barometer for the shifting patterns of contemporary language and climate. To date, each of the pools thematically pushes the artist’s investigation into our collective relationships with language from different perspectives. If earlier cycles were more synonymous with the parlance of the online and digital, the latest pool7 examines release from the governing nature of language, instead succumbing to more gestural and guttural forms of communication. Turato’s upcoming installation in Zagreb exemplifies this approach on a monumental scale, choosing to inscribe a primal scream around the length of the Meštrović Pavilion, home of the Croatian Association of Fine Arts.

Night view of a modern glass building displaying large red letters "A" and "a" in its windows, illuminated from within. — Nora Turato, installation view. ‘*Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!*’, Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, 2024. Claes Storm

Turato’s pool iterations typically take shape over the course of a year, composed of collected texts interwoven with her own writing, forming the foundation of her monologue scripts. All of this language—both found and authored—is preserved in her pool publications, anthologies she equates to as “annual reports" that capture the zeitgeist of their moment. Turato pulls these fragments of language further and incorporates them into her diverse practice spanning wall painting, sound, enamel panels, large-scale video installations, among other formats.

The unifying thread across Turato’s practice is her sustained inquiry into our relationship with language—its authority over collective experience and its role in structuring communication. Through processes of appropriation and recontextualization, she exposes the instability of language, showing how words can shift, fracture, or collapse when subjected to new forms.

International Recognition

Over the past ten years, Turato has steadily gained wide international recognition, having been the subject of exhibitions and projects at institutions such as the Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Kunsthaus Zurich, and Secession Vienna, among others. Her performances have been staged at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, as well as Performa, the storied performance biennial in New York. Turato is represented internationally by Sprüth Magers, where she has shown across their Berlin and Los Angeles spaces, as well as Galerie Gregor Staiger in Zurich and Milan and LambdaLambdaLambda in Pristina.

Turato uses her exhibitions, both institutional and gallery, to push further each pool series and disclose different stages of development in each. For the installation in Zagreb, Turato sees it as marking the culmination of pool7.

Wall covered with white paper sheets arranged in a grid, each displaying minimal printed text; bare concrete floor in foreground. — Nora Turato, installation view ‘*pool7*’, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, 2025. Rob Harris

Return to Zagreb

In October this year, Turato will present her new commission for The Croatian Association of Fine Artists (HDLU), coinciding with the 60th Zagreb Salon of Visual Arts, one of Croatia’s oldest showcase formats for contemporary art. Turato has been invited to present a large-scale intervention, covering the entirety of the Meštrović Pavilion, a famed and beloved landmark of Zagreb. Currently undergoing reconstruction, the round building has historically hosted previous editions of the Zagreb Salon. Turato’s presentation responds to the pavilion’s distinctive structure and central placement in the city, providing the daily passerby a prompt and a release, to be unveiled on October 11th, 2025.

For Turato, the exhibition marks a chance to bring her multifaceted practice back to Croatia and engage with the burgeoning art scene developing locally. For Zagreb, it signals the city’s growing role as a hub for contemporary art in the region. For both local and international audiences, the exhibition offers a rare opportunity to encounter a major new public artwork by Turato—one that exemplifies her persistent engagement with the mechanics of language and the human traces embedded within it.