«He who combines the useful with the sweet obtains general approval» (Horace, Ars Poetica, 343).

The exhibition Clouds of White Dust, with works by Doruntina Kastrati, curated by Marco Scotini and on view at the Secci Gallery in Milan until 14 June 2025, is a remarkable example of functionality applied in the exhibition field. To function, a verb elsewhere abused in the visual arts, here acquires the meaning of slavish adherence of form to substance; that is, on the one hand, aesthetic fidelity to the subject of one’s reflection and, on the other, ethical coherence in taking this reflection to its extreme consequences. Doruntina Kastrati focuses her sculptural research on the forms of invisibility of contemporary work and on the profound contradictions within the employment market, especially women’s, following liberalist deregulation. The chosen theatre for this investigation is Kosovo, her homeland.

Doruntina Kastrati, “Clouds of White Dust”, installation view, 2025, at Secci, Milano. Ph Stefano Maniero, courtesy The Artist and Galleria Secci

After a significant participation in the 60th Venice Biennale with the project The Echoing Silences of Metal and Skin (deserving of a Special Mention as national participation), at Secci Gallery Kastrati’s project has an ideal follow-up. Clouds of White Dust, the debut appointment of the biennial project NOVO curated by Marco Scotini, thus deepens the investigation into the working conditions of female workers in a lokum factory known as ‘Turkish delight’ in Prizren. The artist’s, and the curator’s, main focus of interest is the unsuspected underworld that hides beneath the tempting appearances of these iconic sweets, the production of which feeds an economy of exploitative female labour that requires long and exhausting standing, forcing a third of the employees to undergo knee surgery. As Scotini suggests, recalling Marx: «The product of labour […] conceals its modes of production because abstract labour is objectified in it, not cast in sensible forms».

Doruntina Kastrati, “Clouds of White Dust”, installation view, 2025, at Secci, Milano. Ph Stefano Maniero, courtesy The Artist and Galleria Secci

Walter Benjamin, on 27 April 1934, gave a speech at the Institute for the Study of Fascism in Paris entitled Author as producer. One of the crucial passages of this timely reading enunciates the impossibility that the artistic product can escape the repetition and the reproducibility, inherent to industrial technologies; on the contrary, it is precisely within these dynamics that the work of art can become, in a Marxian sense, an instrument for the transformation of reality instead of a supine seismometer of its own time. The exhibition faithfully respects this assumption, reproducing to the letter the shapes of the tools that inform the production of sweets. At the same time, these forms, abstracted as they are from their context, are already transformed into something else entirely. Thus the stacks of vertical trays collecting sweets become, in Untitled, a sort of «geometric and minimalist floor piece» (from Scotini’s curatorial text) under the seraphic vigil of a gigantic stainless steel sieve; the space is punctuated by oversized aluminium pistachio shells (The Age of Silver Bones II); two scenographic gold-coloured pieces, above a pedestal, might look like cake moulds but are instead modelled on the prosthetic knees the workers are forced to implant.

Doruntina Kastrati, “Clouds of White Dust”, installation view, 2025, at Secci, Milano. Ph Stefano Maniero, courtesy The Artist and Galleria Secci

The result is visually calligraphic, without exuberance or gaps, and this elegance could perhaps be reproached for wanting to embellish, to sweeten, a field that is in itself cruel. In reality, in the gracefulness that is characteristic of Kastrati’s sculpture and exhibition choices, a further aspect of adherence to the subject matter is shown. The blow-ups of confectionery equipment, which almost seem to want to forget (and make the viewer forget) their original function, and promise themselves free of annoying contradictions, play precisely the same role on stage as the ‘Turkish delights’ play in the marketplace: that is, the visible and seductive part of a submerged and painful world of unfair labour. The substantial difference of Kastrati’s work comparing it to the abusive system that informs it, and the underlying transformative occasion, is that it replaces the aforementioned attitude of abstraction with a spontaneous and objective self-disclosure. Thus it seems that Horace’s precept, taken up by Manzoni, of uniting the useful with the sweet, sprinkling the rim of the glass with honey so that the child swallows the medicine, has been put on stage.

Doruntina Kastrati, “Clouds of White Dust”, installation view, 2025, at Secci, Milano. Ph Stefano Maniero, courtesy The Artist and Galleria Secci

Following an exhibition that has humanity as the great absentee, it suddenly erupts in the two-channel video Sugar, starch, labour (2023): a vital and irreducible afflatus that insinuates itself into the aesthetic impeccability of what is presented to the viewer/consumer, the sculpture or the confectionery. The red syrup falls into the white cream like a reminder of the suffering that capitalism requires in order to defer itself; the clouds of white dust of starch or sugar raised by the passage of the female workers, suggesting their phantasmal and hitherto harmless presence, now become a subversive body; an invitation to action and contestation, having as a vocabulary from which to draw nothing but reality.

Info:

Doruntina Kastrati. Clouds of White Dust
08/04/2025 – 14/06/2025
curated by Marco Scotini
Galleria Secci
via Olmetto 1, Milano
www.seccigallery.com

Kamil Sanders

Born in Venice in 1998, after graduating from high school, he moved to Milan where he studied painting at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts. In 2023 he published his first essay for the Calibano series by Prospero Editore: “Tradizione e Trasgressione. Note dall’India per un’arte indipendente”. In 2024 he won the Europa in Versi Giovani prize, which was followed by the publication in 2025 of his anthology “sillabario del terribile incanto” by Quaderni del Bardo Editore. He is currently attending the two-year course in Visual Arts and Curatorial Studies at Naba in Milan.