In conversation with artist Nora Turato about her artwork currently on display at Kunsthalle Wien, the role of the body in art, her artistic practice & development, whether lies can be authentic and why an artwork is like a child.

Nora Turato was born 1991 in Zagreb (Croatia) and lives and works in Amsterdam (NL). She has already held several solo exhibitions in museums, including the Centre Pompidou and the MoMa in New York. Her work has also been presented in major international exhibitions. In her artistic work, she examines the versatility and influence of language that surrounds us, for example in advertising or on social media. To this end, she extracts snippets of language that she encounters and places in new contexts through murals, performances or installations. For the Kunsthalle Wien she has now created the commissioned work ‘Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!!!!!!’, which will be on display until September next year, 2025.

Bohema: You are exhibiting a 62 metre-long mural that stretches across the south-western wall of the building where the Kunsthalle is located. The work shows 72 red ‘A's against a black background, depicting a scream or a noise. How did you come up with the idea of showcasing one of the rawest ways of expression in such a curated way?

Nora Turato: The idea came to me while I was half asleep. I have this weird thing lately that I can ‘request’ a dream. I go to bed and I’m like ‘ok, I would like to know or dream about this or that’. It feels like AI generating in my head; I try to focus on the project that I am working on at that moment and then I dream about it. I was about to wake up and had this image of the ‘Aaaaaaa!’ in my head. The whole Kunsthalle-building was moving and doing the “Aaaaaaa!’, it was very intense.

Bohema: So, you’ve already known how the building of the Kunsthalle looks like and the place where your work is going to be presented when you had this vision about it?

Nora: Yes, the artistic director Michelle Cotton approached me and requested a site-specific work. I came up with the idea for a different project via a dream as well. It’s my new artistic GPS, I think. (laughs)

Bohema: Sounds like lucid dreaming, where you’re able to control your dreams.

Nora: I really do believe that our bodies contain great creativity and knowledge in the unconscious, more than in our conscious ego mind. I am very interested in this right now, learning about the unconscious, going into your own body and learning what the body has to say.
This work is the first one that I see as an invitation for myself to a new way of creating. It is also an invitation for others, but primarily for me; to start expressing things from my body. My previous work has been a lot about extracting and using words of other people, the language we consume, the extensive news cycle we live in. I’ve reached the point where I am reflecting on that, and what it means to me as an artist to continue doing that versus breaking through it. This work is an invitation for me to break through it, definitely.

B: I can imagine that, as an artist, it’s of importance to reflect on your work from time to time. You started as a graphic designer, which one can still see in your artistic practice, where you hand paint your graphic looking murals for example, but you are also doing performances. How did your artistic practice start and evolve?

N: When I was younger, I liked making music and singing. This performative, vocal way of expression has always been in me. For me, performance art, which is performed by the artist with its body, is the art form closest to its source, to the human. It is interesting to think about and to explore how close art forms are to their source.

All the forms of art have an impact on each other, and I see my performance art as a bit closer to the source than my murals for example, where the paint stands between the source and the outcome. But my performances are still connected to my murals, graphic works and my other artistic practices, because they all come from the same source: I made this wall painting and because of it, I have all these conversations about what it means to express yourself, to scream, to insist. These conversations are going to have an impact on my next artwork. I opened my practice to all kinds of different forms, because they feed into each other just like that.

B: Your mural is displayed in a very public space where everyone passing by can see it. What kind of reactions do you expect or hope for?

N: There are reactions that I would hope for, but I think it doesn’t matter what I want. The most interesting thing that can happen to me regarding my art is when someone tells me that they see something completely different in it than I anticipated.

There is this moment when you put something into the world and then it’s not really yours anymore. It’s there for others to project on and to look at it with other lenses than you, other experiences, other beliefs, other conditionings, other baggage, a different way to perceive reality. We perceive things from the point where we come from. There is a collective aspect to that, but also a personal one.
Regarding this mural I realized that most people see a scream, which I find interesting, because it is just an ‘Aaaaaah’, so to me it can also be the sound you make at your dentist appointment or a sound of relieve, thinking or understanding. There are many meanings, but people primarily see the scream which says something about the collective aspect of it, maybe a collective necessity or an urge to scream, to release, to be loud.

Don’t become a Mickey Mouse, please

B: When I first saw the mural, my first association was also a scream, but more in the sense of the feeling you have before, while and after you scream. A feeling of releasing a pressure that has built up in your body because of frustration, repression or anger. The exhibition text says that it can also be seen as s collective scream rather than a personal, individual experience, what does that mean? Is it connected to the collective aspect you were talking about?

N: Yes. It means that the personal is also collective. We all live in the same world, and I believe that art can be made for very personal reasons and at the same time contain collective implications and meanings that come to light once it is exhibited. The collective aspect is very important. Often, we are preoccupied with artist biographies and images. Because of that, I think the artist becomes a Mickey Mouse, sort of, which is a huge problem. This represses the meaning of the art. I think that being more focused on the artwork and its meaning and impact is much more interesting than focusing on the artist behind it.

B: The artwork comes from an introspective or personal place, but the moment you put it into the public, it is not about the artist and the personal anymore, is that what you mean?

N: Exactly. I make my art from a personal point, but once it is out in the world, I’m so much more interested in letting the artwork do its own thing instead of being limited to me. You could compare it to an overbearing parent who tries to weigh down their hopes and beliefs on their child or to influence it by making it about themselves instead of letting the child develop on its own. An artwork is like a child: It is a product of you, but it is not you. You need to let it go.

B: Regarding other artworks of you: I saw your Instagram post where you react to a billboard where an AI generated owl is depicted, and you also spoke about all the advertisement you see while biking though Amsterdam. How did your practice influence how you see your surroundings?

N: Everything that surrounds you or what you surround yourself with says something about you as well. When you start seeing the spaces you are in in relationship to you, you start seeing it as the same thing. For me, this is kind of what being an artist means; you bring things to the surface about the world that we live in and you address them through your art.

B: How is it with your performances? And how do you experience performing art?

N: I am thinking of taking a break from performing, because I want to figure things out and when you are too involved in something, you can’t properly look at it. You need to step back and look at it from a distance to see and reflect on it. If you look at the performances that I have done, I started very disembodied. It was literally just a head performing other people’s words, and with every performance you could see the story of me slowly re-entering my body in different ways. During my last performance I was channeling different characters, and through this practice of becoming others I found myself. You can find yourself or your center in many ways, but one way of finding it, is becoming other things at first. What I now want to investigate is what is central to me. I want to see what my body wants to express, because my body is my reality. In a disembodied world full of information, advertisement and technology, this is what I want to find out in the next period.
I saw an iPad commercial where they crushed items such as instruments, like a piano, and in the end, it resulted an iPad. That says a lot. (laughs) The technology we use is repressive and flat, it is constantly inviting us to leave our bodies. We are holding the phones in our hands and our attention leaves our body, we start consuming. All this does something to our relationships with others and to our perception to our reality.

B: Is the process of painting your murals by hand instead of printing them a way of embodying your art?

N: Exactly. But at the same time, it is also a loss of the body. People need to be hired, because I can’t do murals this big on my own…

B: …six people worked on it in a period of three weeks, right?

N: Yes. You must work with high precision, applicating the templates for the letters, making the edges neat etc. We had to make it very clean and planned, although it depicts a raw way of vocal expression. This push and pull speaks to me. It is important to me to reflect on my works not only afterwards but also already while creating them, looking at what it is and seeing what it is doing and taking this new knowledge and awareness into the next artwork.

B: So, all your artworks are kind of woven into each other, are interdependent?

N: Yes. With every story surrounding the work, the conversations I have about it or because of it, there comes more insight, and this insight flows into the next work. My artworks don’t stand on their own, they are all connected. I see artworks as notes, points, crossroads. There is no goal in the end, it is a process, a flow of things. I wouldn’t want to make the same artistic practice my whole life. I want it to evolve. That is a beautiful thing about artistic practice. I think it is a problem when an artist is satisfied with their work.

Laughing so you don’t cry

B: At the press conference you talked about this artwork of yours which depicted a ‘haha’ and how you lost interest in involving humor in your art, that you used quite a lot in your work before, after reflecting on it.

N: Yes, this is a strange thing. I made this ‘haha’ wall painting for an exhibition in Los Angeles, the name of the work is ‘authenticity haha’. I started to think a lot about humor and its power, but also its limits. There is just this much you can communicate through humor. I realized that humor is a good way to address issues if other ways are not available, but if other ways of addressing are an option you should go for these first. (laughs) Before, I didn’t know that art is this powerful. I f*cking believe in art. My artworks hopefully do something with others, but they definitely do something with me. The more you acknowledge that, the more you see the impact it has on your life.

B: It reminds me of the expressions ‘laughing so you don’t cry’ or ‘smiling through the pain’. We often use humor as a way of dealing with hard things, as the last resort because we don’t know how to deal with it in another way, or to take some of the heaviness off the topic.

N: Yes. I don’t want to say that my humoristic practice was bad or that I regret it, or that I am never going to use it again. I just found other ways of expression. Humor was right in that time and in these moments and therefore authentic. Authentic is, what is. And that makes it a paradox. I mean, if I was to tell you a lie right now, it would still be the most authentic expression of me that I would be able to perform in that moment.

In advertisement or on social media, slogans like ‘be you’ or ‘become your most authentic self’ are used a lot, often exploited for capitalist purposes. There, you or your authentic self are always something where you are going, that you have yet to become.

B: And then it becomes a never-ending story, because you can never reach that goal, because there are always new or other ways in which you could optimize or find yourself.

N: Exactly, it’s going on and on. You need to accept that all the shit you have to deal with and all the shit you do, the good and bad things - this IS you, already. And that is authentic.

B: This perspective is probably a good way of not feeling as powerless in this society where there is advertisement everywhere that tells you how to optimize yourself, your work, your life in general. Maybe we should try not to aim for optimisation and constantly reaching for a goal, but just aiming to evolve.

N: Just existing means, you must witness everything that is going on around you, the good and the bad stuff. Stopping for a moment to be with yourself, with your feelings and to become aware of your environment…this can be hard. So, we create all these ways and mechanisms - social media, self-optimisation and so on - to move away and to distract ourselves from what is, because reality is A LOT.

B: And it should be okay to acknowledge these feelings of being overwhelmed or being a little lost.

N: Yes, the first step is acceptance. Saying ‘okay, this is a lot, but I will dig through it as good as I can’.