Rainbow Auckland & Bergman Art Gallery Mixer

Bergman Gallery and Rainbow Auckland have partnered up tonce again to bring you a very special evening of art. While the event is running from 7 - 28 March 2026, we have an exclusive opportunity to view this stunning work out of hours.

Nibbles are included with entry, and some alcoholic and non-alcoholic drinks will be served to ticket holders up to a limit.

Berlin-based Taja Vaetoru and Wellington-based Alison Leauanae share a commitment to making identity visible through process: one built slowly through thread, the other through paint. Across the exhibition, memory is not treated as illustration or motif, but as a method—assembled, revised, and held in place by repeated gestures.

Vaetoru is an artist with Cook Islands and Samoan whakapapa, raised on Manihiki and now working between oceans and continents. Their practice moves between figuration and abstraction, drawing on Polynesian cosmologies—at times invoking Tangaroa—and on the emotional architecture of absence and presence, where personal loss becomes a way to think about inheritance, faith, and what endures.

Leauanae’s hand-stitched and hand-woven works on paper develop a visual language shaped by mixed heritage and by migration histories—how movement across place and time reorders what we recognise as “home.” Pattern and geometry are not decorative here; they operate like coordinates, inviting close looking and a slower reading of colour, repetition, and tension.

So’otaga, a Samoan word meaning connection, can refer to their distance, their heritage, and artists as individuals exploring their own connections. Together, the artists propose line as a carrier of genealogy: the stitch and the brushstroke as parallel forms of navigation. Precision and control are present, but so is intimacy—works that honour femininity, ancestry, and the lived complexity of Pacific diasporic life without reducing it to a single story.

• Venue: Bergman Gallery, 3/582 Karangahape Road, Entrance via 2 Newton Road
• Date and Time: Wednesday, 18th March, Doors open at 5:30 pm
• Cost: Free for our members, $20 for those who are not yet members
• Limited capacity.

Not a member yet? We have a membership option to suit everyone.

Join Rainbow Auckland HERE today and attend our monthly events for free all year!

This safe and inclusive event is for all ages, cultures, genders, and sexualities. It is also accessible and neurodiversity-friendly. If you would like support in feeling welcome, please email us at info@rainbowauckland.org.nz, and our Executive Team will introduce you to our outstanding members.

Rainbow Auckland event is a SAFE SPACE, and there will be ZERO tolerance for discrimination or bad behavior.

For safety reasons, every guest MUST register and have tickets to attend.

NO WALK-INS, NO DOOR SALES, NO LATE ENTRY

NO TICKET, NO ENTRY.