Fetishini

Ko wai koe?
I work under the name Fetishini. I’m a queer, trans performance artist exploring the borders between the grotesque and the sacred, the erotic and the abject. My work lives in the cracks—where horror becomes ritual, shame becomes flesh, and what’s hidden begins to seep.

What are your pronouns?
They/them.

Where are you living/working right now?
I’m based in Te Whanganui-a-Tara, Aotearoa.

What do you do and why do you do it?
I make performance-based works that fuse body horror, fetish, and psychological ritual. I do it because it’s the only way I’ve found to give form to the difficult, private terrain of shame, dysphoria, and desire. My work stages encounters with the abject: the parts of ourselves we’re taught to expel in order to be seen as clean, coherent, or good. I’m interested in what happens when we hold those parts out instead.

What are you working on at the moment?
Right now I’m working on an exhibition for Enjoy that draws parallels between medical and environmental neglect, using decay and disease as metaphors for how institutions pathologize and conceal vulnerability.

What do you love about art?
I love that art can transform silence into language—that it can hold space for what we’re not supposed to say or feel. I love its ability to rupture and reassemble, to make the invisible visible.

What are you reading/listening to/watching at the moment?
I’ve been devouring Julia Kristeva’s Powers of Horror—it’s cracked open a new psychic terrain in my work. I’ve also been listening to soundtracks from body horror films and archival recordings from kink workshops—the overlaps are uncanny.

Who is your art crush?
My art crush is ORLAN - for the rawness, the commitment to transformation, and the fearless confrontation of the body as site.
Ooohh and also the drag artist Fecal Matter <3

If you had one wish for the art world what would it be?
If I had one wish for the art world, it would be for more mess. Less polish. More danger. More space for the unsanitised, the disobedient, and the deeply felt.