‘It’s not true, stop lying:’ Why this artist is taking on the wellness industry

(CNN) — Nora Turato is anxious about authenticity. She’s questioning if positive affirmations are positive, or productivity, productive. As for the longevity pushers, or life coaching? “It’s the biggest pyramid scheme out there,” she said.

For the past two years, the 33-year-old Croatian artist has been deep diving into what she called “this whole healing, self-development, self-optimization space”. What has emerged is “it’s not true!!! stop lying!” — a solo show at Sprüth Magers’ Los Angeles gallery, and a riposte to the wellness industry.

The project stems from Turato’s ongoing analysis of “the collective unconscious on the internet,” she explains over Zoom from her Amsterdam studio. Her focus is language and how we assimilate information from the increasingly over-saturated world around us — from well-worn clichés to personal text messages, from advertising slogans to news headlines, from YouTube or TikTok videos to overheard conversations and her own thoughts. These cut-and-copied fragments are brought together in works in the form of books, text-based panels and performances, hosted by institutions such as Vienna’s Secession Building and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

At the latter in 2022, she performed her one-woman “pool 5” monologue live more than 20 times over a two-week period. It was captivating and comically on point, witnessing Turato morph from one persona to another — from a marketing kingmaker to a fraudulent fortune teller — with dizzying speed. The performance was accompanied by a limited-edition book — her fifth pooling together of linguistic titbits, its typographical presentation stemming from Turato’s training as a graphic designer (she graduated from the two-year master’s program at Werkplaats Typografie in Arnhem, the Netherlands, in 2016).

This appropriation of advertising techniques brings to mind the seminal 1980s work of American artist Barbara Kruger, who has used her own background in graphic design (at Condé Nast’s “Mademoiselle” magazine) “to question and change the systems that contain us.” Turato’s take, meanwhile, comes not only from a millennial mindset, but also considers her own post-communist upbringing alongside our hyper-capitalist society. Born in Zagreb, Turato refers to her home country as “very in-between — not really eastern Europe; not really west,” she said. A performative streak as a child — “I would pretend to be a radio”, she said — has also come into play.

For Sprüth Magers co-founder Philomene Magers, “Nora’s work puts people in front of a mirror,” she said. “When I saw what she was doing for her Berlin show (last year), I thought ‘Wow, this would really make sense in LA’. I think it will really resonate.”

In the city often considered the spiritual home of self-optimization, “it’s not true!!! stop lying!” examines Turato’s own skeptical but also susceptible response to the pervasive notion that we can become healthier, happier and truer versions of ourselves. “Sleep / it’s good for you!” glares one wall-mounted enamel panel. Another posits: “I know we are all into woo here, but homeopathy is fake, right? Right!” Meanwhile, a trio of wall paintings, in stark black and white, shout out: “authenticity”, “haha”, “speaking my truth!!!”

“I myself don’t know what I deeply believe about authenticity, if there even is such a thing, but I do know I’m being told to be authentic a lot,” said Turato. “It’s everywhere. You know: ‘buy this, be authentic.’ The whole preoccupation with identity is very confusing to me.”

For the past four years, Turato has been working with Hollywood dialect coach Julie Adams. It’s a process that has also triggered a period of introspection: “Working with your voice, things start bubbling up,” she explained. “You start reflecting on yourself. At first I thought ‘This is good for my work’, and I started all these different therapies.”

She reels off a list: Tomatis sound therapy; EMDR (Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing), to process traumatic memories, and Internal Family Systems, “where you kind of talk to parts of yourself”; the Feldenkrais Method of mindful movement; Holotropic breathwork. “You basically hyperventilate for three hours with eyes closed to this crazy music,” she says of the latter, which she still does once a month. “At some point I started noticing that it wasn’t about work anymore; it was about me.” In this way, Turato embodies both consumer and critic, and explores her own conflicting, even contradictory standpoints.

Her performance at the opening of the LA show was enjoyably melodramatic and darkly comic, as Turato veered from evangelical wellness guru — “Feel the fear and do it anyway. Do some cord-cutting. Some shadow work. Heal your inner child. You’ve got to purify your field,” she spits — to nervous wreck. One line within the performance “I was so focused on healing, figuring my traumas out… I forgot to just live my life,” feels highly personal.

Tellingly, Turato’s self-optimization journey has ended in digital detox. “I’ve gone offline,” she said. “I got a dumb phone. I need a break.” Does she feel any different? “Maybe less anxious,” she suggested, adding that after the LA show opening, she will be setting on a 10-day hike into the Mojave Desert with her husband and a tent. How will this new offline version of herself be mirrored in her work? She’s not yet sure. “It might be just a phase,” she mused, “but I think it’s an interesting phase nonetheless.”

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“it’s not true!!! stop lying!” is at Sprüth Magers Los Angeles (spruethmagers.com) until April 27, 2024