Stories

Friend of Artfull, Dina Jezdic, talks about why art matters

Dina Jezdic is an independent curator, creative mentor, art writer and community organiser based in Tamaki Makaurau Auckland. Artfull co-founder Jessica Agoston Cleary connected with Dina in the early stages of creating Artfull. Over a coffee at Dina’s gloriously eclectic Kingsland villa, they talked about how vitally essential art in all its forms truly is, and the need for artists to lean into their creativity and find multiple ways to connect with their audience. 

What follows is an ‘official’ version of their conversation.

Words by Jessica Agoston Cleary

Photography by All images courtesy of Dina Jezdic

Read time 10 minutes

Share

At Artfull, we are firm believers in the beautiful concept of Whanaungatanga: community, connection and fostering relationships. One of the ways we express this by getting together with people from different facets of the arts and creative sectors, and indeed people from outside creative industries all together, to talk with them about art, life, and everything in between. You could say we like to get all deep and meaningful. And we do. Because ultimately that’s what really counts: understanding, connection, meaning and the stories that help us all make sense of the world. 

Artfull/Jessica Agoston Cleary: Hi Dina, thank you for taking the time to talk with me. You’re one of the busiest people I know, and you wear so many creative sector hats - can you tell me more about your roles? 

Dina Jezdic: "I am an independent curator, creative mentor, art writer and community organiser. Although I was born in Belgrade, I am privileged to be living and working in Aotearoa New Zealand.  I’m currently pursuing an ambitious doctoral study – a cultural analysis on the agency of curating and decolonization methodologies. 

My goal is to connect this leading-edge work with others and have global conversations to inform curatorial knowledge and collective imagining beyond histories of colonization. I love curating with large groups and most of my current projects investigate what connects indigeneity, diaspora and belonging."

JAC: This is such a vitally important area of research and critical interrogation. Especially when we consider the truly globalised world we live in. What fascinates me most about your research is the global connections and inroads you’re making, and the way you’re looking simultaneously backwards and forwards. Can you tell me more about what drew you into this field of research?

DJ: "I find thinking about the future and the challenges it presents endlessly fascinating. Exploring ideas and art that communicates towards the wide understanding of the world is the goal that we can all be connected to. My work highlights the contemporary art practices and engages in a curatorial approach that exemplifies collaborative, indigenous knowledges to identify new horizons and decolonial possibilities, while we collectively work toward qualitatively different futures. This includes initiatives concerning equity and elimination of discrimination. This is important to me as a curator, decolonial scholar and a creative mentor."

JAC: In many respects, this is work that we can all aspire to weave into our lives. Perhaps not work per se, but to take responsibility for even the tiniest role we play when it comes to collective existence and reshaping of problematic narratives. Art, artists and curators are in a unique position to help facilitate and communicate all these ‘big hairy topics’ with a wide audience. Which carries a not insignificant degree of responsibility. I’m interested to know how you enjoy art on a personal level if it’s also your profession?

DJ: "To me it’s an invitation to gaze at what brings me wellbeing, joy and discomfort. These are all valid experiences and I love seeing their entanglement. That is how I approach art. In the present moment, perpetuated by the colonial hierarchy, the boundaries between personal and political have made certain bodies vulnerable, exposed and dispossessed while others protected and safe. With all that is still happening, I engage in questioning; who is being silenced or amplified? What is uncovered and what is buried? Who and where do we belong? Do we see our wellbeing expanding while others are being denied breath? Art is a heavy weight participant in our day-to-day politics and a vessel that helps us through these radical forms of inter-geographical and intergenerational unsettlement. "

JAC: These are all such big, weighty questions, without easy answers. It is exactly as you say: art is a heavy weight participant and a vessel. Which is also exactly why, to my mind, art possesses such power. Even if a viewer doesn’t come to a work of art or a project with any art historical knowledge, or comes to it from a different culture than that of the artist, the artwork is able to bridge this gap. It's a universal language which operates not on pure intellect but on an emotional, visceral level. Tell me, what is art to you? How do you personally define it?

DJ: "Art to me is living potential and an opportunity to participate. I love what it can do, how it can act on us and make us feel. It’s an interaction, an activation, a vessel and a resonance. It is labour born out of human encounters and openness to imagination."

JAC: I love this. Particularly the way you say it’s an openness to imagination. It’s so easy to get caught up in the day to day grind and  negative news stories of political and economic upheaval. Art can be an antidote to this, getting us outside of ourselves. Equally, it helps us make sense of all this very real global and cultural tension. I wonder, what does art do for you? What does it do to you? 

DJ: "It disrupts the narrative that history and memory should be one sided, either happy or unhappy. It requires and demands our intellect to adopt a new set of logical frameworks - a future of self-examination and self-expression when taking up space."

JAC: Yes, absolutely.  Art is an essential catalyst for change. I sometimes feel like artists have an almost prescient, prophetic ability. They can be so attuned to what is going on around them and beyond. If they choose to tap into this, there's the potential that what they create  offers us what we collectively need to help navigate through really unstable terrain. Perhaps this is one reason or way that art matters? 

DJ: "Art matters because denial of white accountability and its supremacist structures is now a common phenomenon born out of our present time of reckoning. These conflicting ideas between personal and artistic are at the core of the restorative justice movement, and they have come to define the space of contemporary art. It’s speaking truth to power."

JAC: Amen to that! I think a lot of people would assume that art that does all this heavy lifting, that speaks truth to power, might be in some way unpleasant or less than aesthetically inspired. What are your thoughts on this? Can you share with us about a work that relates back to the power and matter of art? 

DJ: "Reuben Paterson’s latest grand and enticing sculptural work Guide Kaiārahi (pronouns: he/him) is a ten-metre-high waka (canoe) created as a composite, made up of 595 iridescent crystals. It is a testament to the power of art to be reflexive and reflective about our relationship with colonisation. Positive. Negative. Neutral. All of the above? The waka is a way of breaking the cycle and summoning a healthy dialogue about these entanglements and their beautiful complexities. It’s an opportunity to counter-inscribe and rewrite this cognitive dissonance that wants to portray them as simple and un-unique. The form of the sculpture is drawn from the memory of the “phantom waka” that appeared at Lake Tarawera eleven days before the eruption of Mt Tarawera in 1886. This devastating event resulted in the destruction of the iconic Pink and White Terraces and the loss and displacement of many people. It disrupts the narrative that history and memory should be one sided, either happy or unhappy. 

The taonga that inspired the taurapa (sternpost of a canoe) and tauihu (canoe prow) for Guide Kaiārahi were introduced to the artist by accessing the taonga Māori storage room at Te Papa. Small pieces of whakairo that had been used as a teaching tool for ancestral carvers revealed themselves to the artist as a starting point for the decorative journey of the sculpture. Their lack of known provenance, educational connection and function in guiding ancestral carvers was an appealing fit for inspiring this artwork.

As someone who has spent 10 years working at Auckland Museum, I love this approach to bridging taonga Māori collections and contemporary art.

Reuben Paterson, 'Guide Kaiārahi', 2021. Commissioned by Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki. Owned and generously supported by the Edmiston Trust. Photo: Hamish Melville.
Reuben Paterson, 'Guide Kaiārahi', 2021. Commissioned by Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki. Owned and generously supported by the Edmiston Trust. Photo: Hamish Melville.

DJ: Another artwork that stems from this multifaceted, multiple signifier concept is  Marcel Duchamp’s readymade Fountain. It is the perfect example of object impermanence, fluidity (lol) and how turning something upside down can alter not just its meaning but also its entire reason for existing. I love the sense of humour of this very famous sculpture and how it remains radical today. It’s a story of how a porcelain urinal, an object of utility, continues to question and shape the very definition of contemporary art.

JAC: Two exceptional examples of the myriad ways and layers contained within truly good artwork. I was working at the E.H. McCormick research library when the team were installing Guide Kaiārahi. Peering out the window in front of my desk, watching each piece come together so slowly and carefully was fascinating. Not only from an engineering perspective, but it was like I was bearing witness to the waka emerging from beneath, bringing with it a shimmering new sense of hope. Which is to say that even if a passer by doesn’t possess a deep understanding of the detailed symbolism of Guide Kaiārahi, they’ll still be moved by its sheer beauty and forceful presence. If they’re moved enough to go do some googling, then the artwork is working right. 

Marcel Duchamp, 'Fountain', 1917/1964
Marcel Duchamp, 'Fountain', 1917/1964

JAC: Can you tell me about a favourite artwork that you own personally? What was it about this piece that resonated with you, to the point that you had to own it?

DJ: The glitter dust screen print zebra titled Prayer was a wedding gift from a dear friend and artist Reuben Paterson. It is supposed to be paired with a jaguar titled Blessing to form an active/passive or asexual, or perhaps a co-dependent couple, where Prayer is the predator, and the zebra, its prey. To me it’s an invitation to delve into the entanglements of sexuality, gender, indigenous, settler-colonial and diasporic life. This work is truly fluid and poses as an antidote to the many types of violence we are systemically attempting to displace. 

A collective noun for a group of zebras is called a dazzle (how fitting for a work of glitter!), and through exerting a barber pole optical illusion they cause pests and predators to mistake their movement direction and mistime their attack. The black and white lines appear as if the stripes are moving up or down vertically and just like love, the zebra coat stripe pattern is one of the oldest questions in evolutionary biology. 

I love this work and its heterogeneous influence. To me this piece creates a space of thought and reflection. 

Reuben Paterson, Prayer, 2014, Screenprint & glitter on paper, edition of 30 and 5 AP, paper: 975 x 765 mm, printed image: 910 x 740 mm
Reuben Paterson, Prayer, 2014, Screenprint & glitter on paper, edition of 30 and 5 AP, paper: 975 x 765 mm, printed image: 910 x 740 mm

JAC: Oh this is such a beautiful story. Such a special gift - and how wonderful to have Reuben as a dear friend. I didn’t know the collective term for a group of Zebra was dazzle! Talk of glitter and disruption segues into my next question: what shifts or developments in the Aotearoa New Zealand artworld have you noticed, been the most excited by, or the most troubled/concerned by recently?

DJ: "Our love for art and our hate for the invisible hierarchies of the art world will persist. I am loving the work of Equity for Artists (advocating for resale royalties for artists and payment for image licensing) Arts Makers / Kāhui Ringatoi Aotearoa (concerned about the lack of support for the arts in this country) and Toipoto Creative Career Mentoring (free mentoring programme for the Auckland creative sector focussing on sustainable practice). Our words matter as well as our behaviours. The inequity and lack of legislation surrounding artist’s Intellectual Property in Aotearoa are unsettling, but they must be acknowledged for the sake of change."

JAC: I couldn’t agree more. These groups are essential for being a collective voice for artists. here at Artfull we are fully behind such initiatives. Resale royalties is a big one in our view too. Other countries have resale royalty schemes, it’s about time Aotearoa New Zealand adopted one too. Are there any other shifts or developments internationally that you've noticed recently?

DJ: "The emerging critique of Eurocentrism is allowing all of us to propose other probabilities and a multiplicity of ways to interpret the world. A perfect example is the rethinking of the colonial monuments and their removal from public spaces. Although this a welcome shift, it is important to remember that colonisation was about material resources, and decolonisation and greater sovereignty cannot be achieved through symbolic actions alone. #landback."

JAC: We have seen some of this occurring at a local level - rethinking of colonial monuments that is. You’re right though. Removing a statue of Captain Cook does not magically solve a deeply complex issue. There is still a lot of work to be done, many conversations to be had, and space created for all voices to be heard. Which brings us back to the power of art. It can be the place to start these conversations, guide us through them. So where do we start? Yes with art, but I wonder, do you have any advice to offer for someone new to engaging with art in general? 

DJ: "Art is political and transformative. A shared sense of reality is a nice place to start."

JAC: I think it’s more than a nice place to start - it’s the best place to start. Thank you Dina, this has been a very thought provoking conversation. It’s a true pleasure to absorb some of your knowledge.