I constantly thought about my grandparents, and how they navigated this system – especially my paternal grandparents from Sāmoa, who came of their own accord and learned English in Aotearoa. In contrast, my own emigration out of Aotearoa was supported by a workplace sponsorship and a special visa status for people with PhDs and yet still it was, and continues to be, an arduous process. People I have never met in offices I will never see make life-changing decisions on my behalf; immigration officers and politicians playing the Game of Life for my family. Suddenly, the abstract notion of ‘migration’ has become a confronting reality, a real-life process that I must navigate with every form, every submission of biometric data, every update of address to meet immigration compliance.

Performance artist and sculptor John Vea has spent his career making audiences aware of migration and labour, bringing to light the invaluable toil of the most precarious workers – so called low-skilled and temporary migrant labourers. Perhaps one of the most consistent threads throughout his practice has been a focus on the Recognised Seasonal Employer (RSE) scheme. The scheme came into effect in 2007, and supports the recruitment of temporary horticulture and viticulture workers. While originally capped at 8,000 workers, in 2025 the cap has risen to 20,750 – more than doubling the original number – with workers coming from the Pacific, specifically Fiji, Kiribati, Nauru, Papua New Guinea, Sāmoa, Solomon Islands, Tonga, Tuvalu and Vanuatu. Since the scheme’s inception, Vea has been exhibiting the sculpture Import/Export (2008–16), which consists of plaster cones that the artist calls urban taros, packaged in crates and labelled according to the RSE scheme countries. Here, the taro are the workers, dehumanised and presented to audiences as objects. Bodies are commodified to be bought and sold by the highest bidder, shipped internationally as needed. The emphasis on bodies turned into objects is something Vea continues to explore in Ini Mini Mani Mou, through the mechanisation and gamification of labour, where people are brought, sold and moved around at the convenience of those further up the capitalist ladder. At the other end, the migrant labourer similarly must ‘buy in’ to the vision and aspirations that lead people to seek work in the first place. This speaks to our willingness to buy something when it is advertised to us, and our trust that it is what it seems.

Vea’s work draws on his own experiences of low-skilled labour, including during his time as an art student at Auckland University of Technology. Through installation and moving- image works he recreates working environments that extend the lived realities of low-skilled labourers (and his own) to the audience. As curator Ioana Gordon-Smith has previously noted, his work personalises the working class by animating the role of the labourer, bringing the human back into view.¹ Not only is he himself creating from an insider’s perspective, but he also creates the conditions for audiences to come inside too. Shown at Te Tuhi in Tāmaki-Makaurau, Vea’s 2018 installation mirroring the Bluebird factory where he worked one summer, is etched in my memory. Behind a heavy plastic curtain the darkened gallery is inhabited by two life-sized projections of workers, dressed identically in hi-viz orange polo shirts, plastic aprons, hair nets, earmuffs and gloves. The projections watch plaster forms (which are physically in the space) as they move along an industrial conveyer belt consisting of spinning rollers. Over time the conveyer belt abrades the plaster, creating a pile of dust on the floor beneath. On the wall is a clock and a TV. The title, you kids should only experience this for a moment – don’t be here for life like me, is a quote from his Sāmoan co-worker, offering advice that speaks to time and the way in which a lifetime can be centred around one’s job, which in the case of factory work means being on the clock. Mimicking the real breaks that these factory workers have, every two hours the projected workers stop and the TV turns on to play Al Jazeera. Once the break is over, the TV turns off and the workers reappear. The temporal experience of work and scheduled breaks extends the factory conditions to the gallery space, and audiences experience the artwork as determined by Aotearoa labour law, which stipulates one paid ten-minute rest break per two-to-four hours of work. Just as migration is for some a semi-abstract concept, so too is low-skilled labour, unless you yourself have experienced that kind of work or been in proximity to it. Stories of such work are so often the subject of news stories or headlines, and yet most people are unaware of how chicken chips are made, or by whom.

Another installation where time functions similarly is Vea’s Section 69ZD Employment Relations Act 2000 (2019) exhibited in his Australian debut solo exhibition If I pick your fruit, will you put mine back? at 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Sydney. In this work Vea builds on the temporal experience of breaks, constructing a break room based on the one he used while working at a prominent Aotearoa packing company. The room is painted a harsh creamy yellow and filled with folding trestle tables and white plastic chairs. Tropical posters on the walls act like windows onto the Pacific homelands of the workers who might occupy this space. On top of the beach scenes are quotes from writers such as Teresia Teaiwa and Albert Wendt offering workplace mantras. Cheap coffee is positioned alongside corned beef, tinned fish and breakfast crackers – the diet of champions. Audiences are only able to enter the break room from 10 to 10.10am, 12 to 12.30pm and 3 to 3.10pm, the legal break times stipulated by the clause in the Employment Relations Act that the installation is named after. Just like at Te Tuhi, Vea extends the reality of factory labour to art gallery leisure. In a way there’s something funny about the restrictions he sets in place for gallery audiences who are not used to having their time with artworks restricted like this. It speaks to the gentle humour found throughout Vea’s practice, which softens the way in to understanding the precarious class struggles of this kind of worker.

At the 2024 Busan Biennale in South Korea, Vea re-presented Section 69ZD Employment Relations Act 2000, again creating a break room which was only accessible to audiences during standard Aotearoa break times. The room was accompanied by a projection of a durational performance titled 96 degrees in the shade (2024), in which Vea constructs and deconstructs a temporary structure over an eight-hour period, moving it so that he can remain sheltered from the sun. The structure is a booth inspired by the small footpath kiosks run by shoe-shiners that the artist encountered during a visit to Busan, which offer very little shelter from the city’s harsh weather conditions. The constant shifting of the booth illustrates the constant movement required to find shade for those who are in more precarious positions, and probes at larger questions about the politics of shelter. While focused on a traditional eight-hour working day, the movement of the structure present here also echoes the need to move for labour itself, from one place to another. While migrant labour continues to make the world go round, it is also increasingly under threat in global moves toward the political right. With president Donald Trump’s second term in office we are seeing the return of strict migration policies, with promises of mass deportation and detention. In this resurgent populist anti- immigration rhetoric, those who travel the world in search of the opportunities promised to them in social fictions are dehumanised. For some people migration is a political game, for others it is their life.

Interestingly, Vea’s own labour has recently also undergone a migration, both physically from Tāmaki Makaurau to Ōtautahi, and professionally from low-skilled temporary labour to supplement his studies, into professorship and academia in his role as lecturer in sculpture at Ilam School of Fine Arts. While long-held debates about the separation of the art from the artist might dissuade a consideration of personal labour and professional positions, for Vea they are deeply connected. He has consistently used his lived experiences to make work that brings into relief the wider socio-political context of Pacific migrant labour in Aotearoa, creating a kind of empathy toward the Pacific working class for art audiences. Therefore, there’s an interesting question about how Vea’s own transition into a different form of labour will play out in the future of his practice. I wonder what his new kind of labour can bring into relief?