Saturday 22 August • 3 - 4PM • Free Event
In Conversation
Sefton Rani & Dina Jezdić
Join us for a conversation between artist Sefton Rani and Dr Dina Jezdić, exploring the ideas, processes, and inspirations behind Rani’s exhibition at The Arts House Trust, Clear My Throat, curated by Jezdić as part of our annual Guest Curator programme.
Sefton Rani
The work of Sefton Rani (Aotearoa NZ / CK) is an ongoing exploration of his Pasifika identity in the context of working class and industrial Auckland. Referring to his works as ‘industrial tapa’ Rani sees his practice as sculpting in paint to create a contemporary Pacific art that reflects the, in large part, industrial working-class reality of Auckland’s Pasifika community, and eschewing the overtly ‘Pasifika’ motifs and imagery more commonly employed.
While continuing to be informed by traditional tapa, carving, tattoo, weaving and tivaevae, his work fits within, or grows out of, the new Pasifika art Dr Karen Stevenson documented in her book The Frangipani is Dead: Contemporary Pacific Art in New Zealand, 1985- 2000 (2008), a product of the Pasifika diaspora, adapting to a new and very different urban context in Aotearoa.
Using the physicality of paint as his primary material, Rani creates his work from solidified paint skins in a process of investigating its sculptural opportunities. It doesn’t just sit flat on a canvas, it bubbles, holds impressions, imitates industrial surfaces, is blowtorched or carved into, or simply exists as an object. His practice reflects the years he spent working in an Auckland paint factory, and both commemorates and elevates the otherwise ignored and unseen labour of Pasifika peoples in hard, manual jobs in Aotearoa.
Rani was awarded the McCahon House Parehuia artist residency in 2025.
Dina Jezdić
Dr. Dina Jezdic is an independent curator, art writer, and decolonial scholar. Her work critically examines the intersections of indigeneity, diaspora, and belonging, with a focus on structural inequities in gender, race, sexuality, and class. Her doctoral research, Decolonial Museum Practice Through Performance Art and Activation: A Collective Autoethnography, explores performance as a radical methodology for disrupting colonial narratives and catalysing institutional transformation.