Clouds of White Dust

SECCI Gallery, located in Milan, is pleased to announce the opening of Clouds of White Dust, the first Italian solo exhibition by Kosovar artist Doruntina Kastrati (1991), as the inaugural event of the biennial project NOVO, curated by Marco Scotini. Presenting significant new works, the exhibition represents a further development of the project presented by the artist at the last Venice Biennale in the Pavilion of the Republic of Kosovo.

Fresh from her participation in the 60th Venice Biennale (where she received a Special Mention as a national participant) and Sharjah Biennial 16, Doruntina Kastrati has gained international attention for her sculptural research on the forms of invisibility within contemporary labor and the current unstable economic conditions of the employment market. Her research starts from the ground up, from first-person accounts of precarious individuals, those who exist on the margins: workers who have lost their jobs or become disabled during the construction of Kosovo’s highways, as well as underpaid female workers subjected to heavy workloads in a lokum factory in Prizren. But her projects also refer to signs and tools associated with the world of labor in supplementary forms, such as the structure of metal truck crates that transport goods and workers in Sharjah.

As we know well from Marx, the product of labor, once transformed into a commodity, conceals its modes of production because it embodies abstract labor, not tied to sensible or concrete forms. This would explain the “fetishistic” or enigmatic character of the commodity. In this sense, Doruntina Kastrati refers to abstract-minimalist modes to bring to light hidden but fundamental narratives of contemporary exploitation. She does so with determination and an unprecedented sensitivity, focusing on labor conditions and new class relations, starting from the economic context of Kosovo after the war, the increasing local American presence, and a progressive form of privatization. The exhibition Clouds of White Dust is an eloquent example of this, precisely because of its striking character.

If we imagine (or taste) the typical and iconic Turkish delight cubes with their soft and chewy texture, no one will question the production methods or the conditions of the workers who made them. Doruntina Kastrati, on the other hand, shows us that behind the harmless appearance of these products, which have the appealing flavor of nuts, pistachios, or orange, there is an entire economy of exploitation that sustains small businesses through the flexibility of female labor, requiring long operational hours spent standing. The two-channel video Sugar, Starch and Labour documents a moment in the preparation of the sweet; the stacks of vertical trays that hold the confections here become a sort of geometric, minimalist floor piece, while cold aluminum sculptures in the shape of pistachio shells hang from the ceiling or lie on the ground: The Age of Silver Bones II. Or, placed on a pedestal, two golden sculptural pieces that might seem like molds for sweets are, in fact, modeled after prosthetics used for surgical knee implants for the female workers: a reference to the project presented at the Venice Biennale, The Echoing Silences of Metal and Skin.

The white clouds evoked by the title are, in reality, those of cornstarch or powdered sugar that fill the factory space during working hours. But in Doruntina Kastrati’s work, they become ghostly and spectral presences, like an urgent warning of something that returns as a sudden apparition. A silent invitation to denunciation and social reclamation.