Dina Jezdic

Over the last four years and thanks to @thebigideanz , I have been incredibly lucky to direct and lead the mentoring work with over 600 artists and creatives. @toipotonz has been instrumental in their entrepreneurial journey. This week The Big Idea launched their Learning Network, an online platform for creatives with access to learning modules and resources that I helped develop. The site is live and accessible to all, designed to accelerate the pathway to sustainable careers and capability building. Go check it out! 💥

My personal life love (with Eddie Giesen @coffinbrothersjewellery ) and my love of art have always been inseparable. Our beautiful kids are a testament to this land, this context and our cultures. ❤️‍🔥🎶❤️‍🔥🎶 Berlin & Frida are lucky to have so much to draw from... their incredible kura Newton Central School and learning their mother tongue every Friday at the DALMATINSKO KULTURNO DRUŠTVO. 💚🎶💚🎶 Thank you to @vicarofmiranda and @thebigideanz , @toipotonz that is my mad mahi love and focus at the moment. I am so very blessed to work with so many incredible artists that are teaching me so much every day! What a life! 💛🎶💛🎶 Thank you for your friendship and your art gifts Lonnie Hutchinson @lon_donna , Reuben Paterson @reuben_paterson and Kristine Mary @kristine__mary . I love you angels ♥️🎶♥️🎶 And last but never least thanks to Rose Swale @rosiepieteacup for the mad hook up! 💜🎶💜🎶. Link in bio 🔗 and @stufflifestyle 🥰

Last year, I wrote and completed my doctoral thesis on 30.12. 2023. Today marks 104 days since the world was split in two, and the dreadful events in Palestine have increased, as the recent South African allegation to the ICJ has shown. As I celebrate and experience the personal release, I am also continually challenged by the grief that shows up in my everyday life, revealing the interconnection between all of us and showing me how much my personal choices are intertwined with the larger collective. This learning has also been the greatest outcome of my research on decoloniality. In these last few weeks of coming up for breath, I have so many people to thank and acknowledge for my decolonial work and my thinking over the years that have shaped the outcome of my doctorate. In particular, I want to acknowledge my husband and my children, who have had to share the burden of my absence. I have been going through a lot of awakening and shedding elements that are no longer in alignment with who I am becoming. I am grateful for these shifts as I reflect on my state of mind, the personal sacrifices I had to make, and that my family also endured by supporting me. In these very private moments, I am prioritising rest and mindfulness, and I have that wisdom to thank Audre Lorde for. I welcome the neural pathways that will be reshaped by self-care that will ultimately impact my work, relationships and how I show up in this revolution. I look for mental calmness to help me with dealing with difficult situations, personal and collective. This is not resilience, which in the past, I have embraced by pushing through. Instead, this year, in 2024, I embrace equanimity. I am lighter and more self-aware and look forward to the change that comes with that. As a decolonial researcher, I express my full solidarity with the people of Palestine. I reject the colonial occupation of Palestinian territory and the apartheid system operated by the state of Israel, supported by the United States and its European allies. I reject the bombing and genocidal actions in the Gaza Strip and the cruel tolerance of Western countries - Immediate ceasefire! 🍉🍉🍉 #freepalestinenow

Set inside the former Ospedaletto hospital complex, CANICULA unfolded like moving through a nervous system. The curatorial pacing was remarkable: corridors functioning as palate cleansers, shifts in temperature and light, moments of acoustic quiet after intense psychological compression. The building itself became a blueprint for the exhibition’s emotional architecture. Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s 450XL: The Story of a Fugitive Sound investigates the alleged use of a sonic weapon against student protesters during the silent Belgrade demonstrations of March 2025. There is a moment in the footage where the crowd suddenly disperses in panic, and what stands out is the absence of visible force. No explosion. No identifiable source. Just bodies reacting to something overwhelming and internally experienced. The work gathers testimonies from protesters who describe hearing, or more accurately feeling, something like an approaching jet engine: pressure, vibration, a mechanical force moving through the crowd. A form of violence collectively sensed yet difficult to record, image, or prove. In Belgrade (my birthplace), students gathered in silence to protest corruption and governmental violence. That silence was met with a force that could not be seen but was physically registered by those present. It sits in the terrain Abu Hamdan renders palpable, where power operates through conditions experienced collectively but difficult to stabilise as image or proof. What @lawrenceabuhamdan produces is a precise spatial and emotional structure. By constructing conditions for viewers to encounter an experience without claiming it as their own, the work translates collective memory into sonic and spatial form, holding the audience in the gap between sensation and evidence. Within the wider context of this year’s Biennale, shaped by protest, state violence, institutional silence, exclusion, and systemic power, the piece lands with razor sharp clarity. Curated by @alessandro.rabottini @leonardobigazzi @fondazioneinbetweenartfilm ♥️♥️♥️♥️😎

Today in Rome, I visited San Francesco a Ripa and stood before Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s Blessed Ludovica Albertoni. This morning, so far away from Aotearoa, I woke to the devastating news of the passing of artist Monique Lacey. Last year I spent time with @moniquelaceyartist in her studio while writing a commissioned text on her work for @foenander_galleries and I remember our conversations with such warmth, intelligence, humour, and generosity. We had hoped to work together again this year on a new publication, a collaboration that now heartbreakingly won’t happen. Standing before Bernini’s sculpture today, I couldn’t stop thinking about Monique’s work. The folds beneath Ludovica’s body, where the stone somehow behaves like fabric, weight becoming softness … felt uncannily close to Monique’s cardboard structures, where crushed boxes transformed into what looked like crushed steel or industrial metal. Both artists understood something profound about material illusion: the ability of one substance to hold the memory, tension, or performance of another. Monique could make cardboard feel impossibly heavy. Bernini could make marble feel impossibly soft. And in both cases, the transformation was never just technical virtuosity. It was emotional. Material becoming unstable. Certainty collapsing. Matter carrying vulnerability, pressure, force, tenderness. Today, unexpectedly, Rome gave me a way to think with Monique again. Sending love from afar to her family, friends, collaborators, and all those in Aotearoa who loved and respected her work and spirit. @mothermother_archive @scottlawriegallery_ ♥️♥️♥️

Alfredo Jaar’s The End of the World might be the most devastating work inside the Arsenale right now. Installed within Koyo Kouoh’s posthumously realised exhibition In Minor Keys, the work feels like a compressed geological prophecy. At its centre sits a small cube composed of the critical minerals sustaining contemporary technological life: cobalt, lithium, copper, coltan, nickel, rare earths. The raw materials powering our phones, batteries, AI infrastructures, and fantasies of infinite acceleration. @alfredojaar condenses extraction into an object so minimal and seductive it becomes almost unbearable to look at. The installation transforms the Arsenale into the interior of the Earth, or perhaps the subconscious of global capitalism. We become witnesses to an apocalypse in mineral form. What makes the work extraordinary is how directly it now speaks to the political rupture surrounding this Biennale: protests, withdrawals, police confrontations, open letters, and the resignation of the Biennale jury over the inclusion of the Israeli and Russian pavilions. Suddenly the work ceases to function as metaphor. Because The End of the World understands that contemporary conflict is geological. Extraction and war, technology and occupation, empire and resource control remain inseparable. In any functioning Biennale, this work would have won the Golden Lion for Best Participant in the International Exhibition. Instead, Jaar withdrew the work from prize consideration in solidarity with the resigning jury, making the gesture inseparable from the politics the installation so powerfully confronts. 🖤🖤🖤🖤

Today, the Venice Biennale stopped pretending that art and politics can exist separately. In what has been described as the first strike of its kind in the Biennale’s history, workers, artists, mediators, technicians, and cultural staff shut down pavilions across the Giardini in protest against Israel’s inclusion amid the ongoing genocide in Gaza. The action was organised by the Art Not Genocide Alliance alongside local cultural worker groups. What struck me most at the Arsenale was the way the protest entered the exhibitions themselves. Artists transformed installations with Palestinian flags, posters, and placards reading “No Artwashing Genocide.” Works stopped functioning as sealed aesthetic objects and became active political surfaces. The exhibition itself was interrupted and rewritten in real time. Today at the Biennale, artists refused the fiction of neutrality while Gaza continues to be annihilated. Many are choosing to use their platforms to speak clearly while the world is watching. Among the interventions I encountered were altered installations by Tabita Rezaire and @alfredojaar , alongside workers and participants openly expressing solidarity with Palestine throughout the Arsenale. #noartwashinggenocide #artnotgenocidealliance

Florentina Holzinger’s Sea World Venice at the Venice Biennale is, without exaggeration, the sharpest dismantling of spectatorship I’ve witnessed, and somehow also the most entertaining. I queued for over an hour to get in, only to realise the queue was the work. An underwater amusement park, sewage plant, and church. Or simply: Venice, distilled. Holzinger doesn’t let you watch the spectacle… you are the spectacle. Your body, your presence, your waste, literally, feeds it. A closed-loop system where action and consequence collapse. You arrive for beauty; you leave implicated in sustaining it. A woman rides a jet ski in endless circles through a flooded pavilion and we cheer. Of course we do. We always do. Even as it becomes clear this isn’t entertainment but an ecological obituary… turbo-tourism as choreography, repetition as collapse. And Venice, sinking, seductive, impossible, remains the perfect stage. We know what we’re doing by being here. That’s the point. We know, and we come anyway. I loved every second. If there were a Golden Lion this year, it wouldn’t be a question. 😎 @floholzinger

There’s a particular energy in Venice at the opening of the Biennale. Today felt as much about people as place: a reminder that this community can feel both expansive and deeply intimate at once. Venice resists easy explanation. Maybe it’s because it’s held up by what you don’t see… an underwater forest, a hidden architecture beneath the surface. Or maybe it’s the constant presence of water: reflecting, softening, and at times disorienting. The city seems to rearrange your sense of space, where everything feels both grounded and slightly unmoored at the same time. You move through narrow passages that suddenly open into impossible expanses. Opulence and stillness exist side by side, never quite resolving. Here’s to a week of getting lost, finding one another, and letting the city do its work. ♥️♥️♥️

Big raffle-winning energy. Manifesting. One last lap of @aotearoaartfair before I swap Tāmaki for Venice. If Hard Epic by @judymillar.jm mysteriously ends up in my living room, you’ll know why. Thanks to everyone who’s made the past few days such a joy! 💋So many great conversations, reunions, and art-induced spirals. Off to the @venice.art.biennale and the beautiful chaos of the Vernissage. Back in a couple of weeks. 💫💫💫 Photo by the brilliant @raymond_sagapolutele ♥️♥️♥️♥️

Opening night at the @aotearoaartfair is always a reminder that, despite what the cynics might say, this is one of the most generous events on the arts calendar. For a few days, galleries, artists, collectors, and art lovers from across the motu gather under one roof. Part reunion, part celebration, part giant group exhibition. I love the way our art community comes together here; everyone shows up for one another. ♥️♥️♥️ A particular highlight was SPADES, curated by Chevron Hassett and featuring Harrison Freeth, Jimmy Ma’ia’i, Lolani Dalosa, and Chevron Hassett. Transforming their booth into a pop-up hāngī-inspired fundraiser, SPADES brilliantly explored exchange, value, and cultural commodity through limited-edition packs, daily raffle draws, and exclusive prizes. It was generous, sharp, funny, and deeply engaging. The atmosphere was pure manaakitanga, with the artists welcoming visitors into an experience that felt as much performance as presentation. Smart, playful, and impossible to resist, exactly the kind of work that reminds you why art fairs matter. If you’re heading along today, come and say hello at the McCahon House Trust booth, 41A, on Level 2. I’ll be there all day. ♠️♠️♠️

At @origine.nz last night, food, conversation, and art came together in spectacular fashion as part of the VIP programme for the Aotearoa Art Fair. It was a privilege to be in conversation with @reuben_paterson , reflecting on more than two decades of a practice that moves effortlessly between painting and sculpture, surface and depth, glitter and gravitas. We traversed the origins of his iconic use of glitter, tracing it back to childhood, Piha, and the magnetic pull of light… through to his life in New York and the extraordinary new works on view with @bergmangallery this week, including a radiant new coral diptych. Koro (grandfather), Reuben’s sculpture for the Art Fair’s Sculpture Trail, takes its form from the pūtātara (conch trumpet). Named in honour of his grandfather, Jack Paterson, the work folds together whakapapa and material: sand, shell, and glass, connecting celestial forms to deeply personal histories. Its origins trace back to Jack’s work as a sand miner in Matatā, supplying material that would quite literally help build Aotearoa. 🐚 🐚 🐚 Reuben’s work always dazzles, but it also grounds, connecting the luminous to the intimate, the spectacular to the deeply felt. 🤍🤍🤍 Chef Ben Bayly crafted a menu inspired by Reuben’s practice that was as thoughtful as it was delicious. Everything was beautifully balanced, inventive, and utterly memorable. 💋👌🏼 A huge thank you to the @aotearoaartfair team for such generous and elegant hospitality. Beautiful evening and a great reminder of what art can do: bring people together, spark conversation, and create moments that shimmer long after the night is over. ✨ Special thanks to @bergmangallery for the 📸 🫶🏻