Slow and Unstoppable

Yeast is a living agent, a catalyst capable of activating flour, water, and air. In these static matters, it awakens the latent potential to come together and become something else: a dough, then bread, a roll, a pretzel, and other forms of nourishment. This process of transformation,  unchanged for millennia, was once believed to be a form of magic. In much the same way, immigrants activate and reshape their lives in Western societies, not only adapting to new socio economic realities but subtly reforming them in return. In the case of bakery workers scattered across the West, the labor of making bread becomes entangled with the making of futures, for themselves and for the communities they feed.

For his newly commissioned exhibition, Kemil Bekteši takes yeast as a point of departure to reflect on labor, migration, and resilience. This reflection emerges from a deeply personal place. His father, Ruzmir Bekteši, is a baker whose labor enabled Kemil’s artistic practice. Through his work, Kemil gives voice to his father, and by extension to all those whose labor creates the unseen conditions for art and survival. 

Rooted in personal histories, the works turn the gaze toward the working conditions of Kosovar’s dispersed across the West– not as stereotypes, but as workers, as artists, and individuals who navigate the in-between. Today, it’s estimated that about one third of people born in Kosovo live abroad. The trope that the Kosovar baker owns or works in a bakery is a familiar nationalistic stereotype in the Balkans, often repeated without pause or reflection. Here, Kemil Bekteši picks up that very cliché and turns it inside out, examining what lies beneath. 

Slow and Unstoppable, features a series of processual installations, composed of stainless steel structures, from which dough slowly, quietly grows. The cold, industrial and sterile metal, a standard in professional kitchens, becomes the frame for something soft, warm, and alive. The dough keeps rising from within, transforming the installations throughout the course of exhibition. Slowly. Unstoppably. Surrounding these sculptural works are Maps001—004, wall drawings of somewhat abstract maps. These maps Kemil produced in the cities he recently worked in, including Berlin, Sarajevo, Ljubljana, New York, always going further west. In each city, he visited each Kosovar-owned bakery, mapping their coordinates and connecting them.  This cartographic gesture reads as a form of urban and diasporic pilgrimage that allows one to connect with the roots far away from home. The gallery reverberates a constant hum which is a sound piece recorded at Ruzmir Bekteši’s workplace. GGM21, captures the sound of a dough mixing machine that his father turns on each morning at 2:00 AM. By the time the bakery opens, both machine and Ruzmir have already been working for hours, unseen and unheard. In the exhibition space, this low hum becomes the voice of that invisible work(er). 

Together, these works speak of migration, transformation and fermentation as both metaphors and methods of life. Just as a microscope reveals fermentation is not magic but work, in parallel, Kemil’s installations uncover the slow and cumulative processes that shape the diasporic lives: generational persistence, care, and endurance. 

Curated by Bojan Stojčić