CURA.

Trapped between the desire for authenticity and the burden of uniformity, gentrified language has not only pervaded our urban fabrics, but also our (digital) bodies and brains. Our expressions balance on the fault lines of the too-early and already-too-late, the heart-felt and the under-complex, the coinciding of the predictable and the surprising, the trash and the well-designed, the longed-for autonomy and relentless determinism, the fearful, unbridled intensity and ever flowing flatness. In that world of commerce, digital aesthetization and representations of the self, Turato’s work elucidates a fierce, but fearful world. Its crux being “[w]ords are way too easy to play with, but i have only words to play with, wooooordsss.”

Nevertheless, performance only constitutes one aspect of Turato’s wide range of productions. Trained as a graphic designer, her visual work highlights a passion for image, referencing forms and idioms of a daily, metropolitan life. Be it a poster series evoking the color-sectioned design of cigarette packaging or huge graffiti tags sprawling across museum walls, Turato’s forms work by way of blow-up, leaving an eerie discrepancy between medium and message: “I retain nothing but headlines. I almost retain nothing.” Turato’s ‘print renaissance’ easily inscribes itself into a lineage of the stark, but tongue-in-cheek declarative statements by Barbara Kruger and the conceptual meditations on authorship by Louise Lawler. Yet, taking language solely as its main producer of meaning, Jenny Holzer’s disquieting Truisms (1977-79) retrospectively feel like an echo of Turato’s work from the future. And in the meantime, ‘mall-generation’ became iGeneration. Billboard turned into motherboard.

“We must finish her off, I’m afraid!” she screams. Turato fiercely casts off the historical cosmology of female silence and penetrates the space with sharp, multilateral sonorities. In the Palermitan Oratorio di San Lorenzo, Turato installed a hybrid sculpture (i’m happy to own my implicit biases (malo mrkva, malo batina), 2018) made out of pierced, black metal. It recalls both a confessional and a church bench. This set-up, blending the convolutions of Sicilian baroque with the stringency of contemporary fencing, serves as the portal for a transhistorical dialogue between Turato and the ‘donas de fuera’ (women from elsewhere) who were at the time of the Spanish Inquisition outcast—and thus silenced—from Sicilian life. Shrieking, her voice echoes, just like the nymph Echo, “the girl with no door on her mouth.”¹ Yet, open mouths have to be fed. Turato’s it’s a good thing he didn’t click (2019), a hybrid between a minimalist sculpture and a Bulthaup kitchen—USB-ports included—, evokes the gluttony of today, sitting somewhere between the lavish and the minimal. A place for feeding. A place for charging.

And in the middle of her gathered statements, a heightened sense of expressivity and a seeming autonomy of text, a question lingers in my mind: why does the ‘i’ in iPhone find rest in a lower case? Pastiche, fragmentation and cut-up drive Turato’s statements into chain of collisions until the I becomes an i. Statement becomes utterance, and the omnipresence of opinion turns into a sea of sound. The ‘i’ of innovation and internet, the ‘i’ as in ‘eye’, the ‘i’ of a lower form of I. Yet, as Anne Carson has it: “Every sound we make is a bit of autobiography.”²