Doruntina Kastrati
Liste Year
Year of Birth
Country of Birth
Presented by
2023
1991
Kosovo
Eugster || Belgrade
Doruntina Kastrati is concerned with Kosovo’s working-class and their social rights. This time, she works with a particular context, informed by her mother’s and her workmates' experiences of working long shifts in a Turkish delights factory. Their cases portray the realisation of living for being human, staying human; of the human body as a silent machine, as these people work in conditions that include non-contractual agreements made of minimum wages, illegal working hours, no benefits or social securities.
[...] Experience can never truly be lived by another, but it can, perhaps, be mediated: the affective allure of the working class mundane and the strain that labour puts on the body are, this time, made manifest not through human figuration, but through a transformation of the body-image into that of a pistachio. The disparate subjects of hiding and hosting the body, or more specifically the worker’s body, continue to be central to Doruntina’s practice: the pistachio cocoon is apt for both of those functions, as it assumes the size and the shape of a possible human shelter. - Natalija Paunić, from the exhibition text for A picture of pistachios destroying the railroad tracks to cut off the path of delights.
The objects that Doruntina will present at Liste 2023 represent an aesthetic of a dual nature: one of simultaneous empathy and dissociation. The delights no longer foster a sentiment of sweetness, celebration or hospitality — rather, they turn into an active tool of commodified labour.
The sculptures are human-size replicas of pistachios, nuts frequently used in production of Turkish delights, cast in aluminium and treated so that they invoke an empathic response in the viewer. The memory of taste speaks to our sentiment and fondness of sweetness, while the reflective metallic surface of the sculpture insinuates the bitter effect of alienating those who work hard to produce it.
"I kept going to work sick, with an injured leg, and my leg was injured again in the same place, because I kept my boots on all the time. Working 12-13 hours straight; we even worked for 20 hours. No rules at all. During my medical leave at the end of 2018, I was fired, even though I had a work contract. I was fired." This is a quote from Doruntina Kastrati's artwork on worker deaths in Kosovo. The work is the result of extensive research, including dozens of interviews, official documents, and digging in archives, and will be exhibited this year at the National Museum in Prishtina as an installation ...
Doruntina Kastrati works mainly across sculpture, installation and moving image. Through her practice, she researches and focuses on the body and its relationship to biopolitical power, directing one’s attention to social and political issues of labor in the global context. She was awarded the Young Visual Artist Award from the National Gallery of Kosovo (2014) and won the Hajde x 6 Award from the Hajde Foundation (2017). She was a resident at the International Studio and Curatorial Program (ISCP) in New York in 2015, a resident at Art House in Shkodër in 2018 and at Initiators in At ...
Ring the bells my land, 2017/22, © Doruntina Kastrati © Manifesta 14 Prishtina, photo / Majlinda Hoxha / Atdhe Mulla
