Eugster || Belgrade presents new works by the artist Doruntina Kastrati, in response to physical labour, emotional processing, and the fields in which they come together. Doruntina observes and documents manual work contrasted to the one of the machine, intertwining the supposed unpredictable organic and the repetitive mechanical. Focusing on the fabrication and production of sweets known as Turkish delights, the new moving-image pieces present the pure aesthetic rendering of an experience, rather than a story subjugated by words — words that, too often, cannot escape the subjective privilege of their unknown original creator.
Experience can never truly be lived by another, but it can, perhaps, be mediated: the video installation is in the company of two larger-than-life sculptures. 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.
The peculiar merge of the cold metallic gear and the product that serves to taste was well noted in the artist’s and her friend and colleague Hana Halilaj’s own text about the subject: “extending the allegory of sweetness, […] the inhumane transpires in the intersection of the individual and collective, […] the corporeal and the spiritual”. What reflects the spiritual, in my view, is not the pistachio husk as a sarcophagus of sorts or an interpretation of the consecrated human form, but rather the repetitive action that invites us to think about parts of the inner life of the worker in the videos. We, as observers, know as well that any repetitive action gradually becomes a ritual during which our minds play out series of subconscious thoughts, worries, wishes, projections, dreams. This is the moment in which the workers finally, understatedly, become persons.
At some point, I caught myself staring into the hand gestures, the slow movement of the fabricated mass, the cut pieces falling from one track to another; I was smitten with a “strangely satisfying” feeling of not wanting to move my eyes off a point out of focus. The sweetness of a possible taste and the sharpness of some distant metal both had me, in an environment that strives to evade the language of oppressive systems. It had me thinking about empathy as one possible answer to the question: What tools do we have at hand, to communicate in ways more innocent than words?
Or in other words (words again):
What works, when everything else has failed?
Natalija Paunić
You can find the video presentation of the show, here.