Meet the artists
Nora Turato
Friends, this is the 76th issue of the weekend recommendation. The short film recommended in this issue is from NOWNESS Global's new series " Meet the artists " , and we'll follow oral artist Nora Turato to document words from everyday life. Slogans on the Internet, posters on the side of the road, advertisements on the walls, language in books... These words, which are everywhere and even mediocre enough to be difficult for us to pay special attention to, have a new charm in her recording and re-creation, and perhaps we should also slow down and pay attention to the words and words around us. The last "Happy Weekend" of 2021.
Topics in this issue
#收集语言
In the chaotic and chaotic linguistic world of artist Nora Turato, political speeches mixed with Kardashian quotes, marketing reports incorporated into IG posts, these somewhat bizarre-sounding combinations seem to be completely uncontroversial in her work.
As a multi-media artist, Turato intertwines three forms of creation: oral performance, graphic design and book production, exploring the possibilities of verbal expression. The Amsterdam-based performance artist and graphic designer documents our modern world like a stenographer in a courtroom.
The internet, blogs, news headlines, comment sections, ads, conversations, books, commercial products, and the ideas in her head are all sources of her collection of words and phrases. In Turato's view: "Everyone can read, can see, can recognize." I didn't create anything new, it was just that I would stop and take notes, which was the only difference. ”
Spoken Words
"Language performance", "avant-garde hip hop" and "verbal spit meeting" are all descriptions of Turato oral performances. When Turato was an image designer, she hadn't imagined herself making a living by acting.
She jokingly refers to herself as "a tall woman who shouts in the street and loves excitement." In her oral performances, she often expresses her thoughts directly in public performances, "almost absurdly shouting and screaming, acting unstable and crazy." "She wants to present the image of a vulnerable woman in her performance, and at the same time, in her opinion, it is actually a stable state of a person."
Graphic Design
"I have a space, and the only way to get credit in that space is to paint the walls, so I have to paint the walls before I do my performance." For Turato, one of the prerequisites of performance is to establish its own authority and power in space.
The fusion of graphic design and language is evident in Turato's work. In her early works, she specifically imitated health warning signs on cigarette packs. The black box box combined with the ordinary Helvetica font, the high-pitched and direct-chested content makes her highly stylized creation even more eye-catching.
She made the words the size of billboards, pasted them on the exhibition wall, or printed them into posters or put them in books. The power of language, the politics of words, and the deviations in people's understanding of words, she silently recorded what happened in words.
Bookmaking
Pool is one of Turato's most iconic works. She puts in the book all the linguistic material she collects every year. She put together the text and made her own "cultural scrapbook." "It's going to be interesting to look back at some things, to think back to the way you looked at them at the time, how different it is now, and I'll have a lot less filters than I did then." Looking back at myself at that time, it is equally interesting. She often goes back in these clippings and finds her former self.
Turato tirelessly collects and recreates these everyday clichés, and no matter what medium she chooses, the quirky atmosphere of this hot language is hard to look away. She easily grasped the words, played with the language, and "swept" the words around at a dizzying speed. She is like a mirror, reflecting the blandness of language in daily life, and at the same time, reflecting the colorful and fragile self and surroundings.
Let's talk
What are the words in your life that keep you in mind?
Written, typeset / Claire
NOWNESS
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