Sulltane Tusha | Embroidering Presence

Gallery70 is pleased to present Embroidering Presence, a solo exhibition by artist Sulltane Tusha, featuring a selection of paintings and embroidered works created over the past ten years.

" In this Albanian debut by artist Sultane Tusha, there are several series to be shown and known in parallel, but I think that the one who’s really entitled to give the name to the whole exhibit is the series of embroidered canvases, as the most heartfelt and three-dimensional of all and this series deserves to make us hold our steps and breaths a little longer while feeling invited to do so.

There is a universal dimension to it, because embroidery marks the moment of transition from instinctive art to craftsmanship as a meticulous cultivation of humanity, the metaphysical moment when the cave asurges to become a house or home. Since science invented the wheel, that is, controlled movement, the physical limit of movement, art invented human presence and not only presence as a mere trace or physical gesture recorded in the cave’s walls, but presence as the art of being somebody, the metaphysical dimension of coexistence. These canvases used as weaving looms, the loom of the original feelings of homeland, originate in a silent dialogue between the artist and her mother, in a moment of loss of communication between the two due to existential hardship. The artist finds an original way of communicating with her origin, as she captures in each stitch a moment that should not be lost – and these are small stabs that must be endured without uttering a sound, because the injuries must be sewn, the wounds of the battles fought and those avoided, must be sewn up. This mother-daughter dialogue, which does not even need words, which hurts a little but does not wound much, where nature renews its metaphysics and hope blooms over despair, is worth listening to with the eyes, and worth thinking with the heart.

Unlike easel painting, which implies standing aside, for the sake of a privileged, judgmental, and reinterpretative point of view, embroidery on canvas enjoys a central position, and what is gathered at the center radiates with vectors of force in several directions at once as it rebuilds the house starting from the hearth, rebuilding presence while moving from a pronounced absence of coexistence.

The other two series are interstitial, research stations and escapes more or less free from the long academic work at the school of Venice, a city immersed like no other in the dimension between dream and watch, while shimmering with all that gold polished or unpolished that bathes those shores and those sunken buildings, or where Tintoretto’s red lingers through those darkened rooms in the brink of collapse by the weight of history itself which begs for a little abstraction from all this excessive reality, like caravans long for oases in the midst of the desert.

The exhibition is energized by the presence of curators and critics, that join the somewhat mysterious but also redeeming presence of the artist herself.."

Text by Astrit Cani, Italy, June 2026