Bruce Connew | A Vocabulary : {Suite} Wellington
I step mindfully onto the farmland to photograph a panorama of the battle site from both Māori and Pākehā points of view. After several footsteps, and with some bafflement, I stop dead in my tracks at a strange sensation deep inside my belly, which today I’m still unable clearly to throw light on. History was here, I grasp that, but this was out of that range. Does earth hold memory, and deliver that memory when the gravity is ripe?
Over several recent years, Bruce Connew has roamed memorials and gravestones of Aotearoa’s colonial wars, seeking out the texts on these testaments to folly. A vocabulary of colonisation. These remnants are scattered across mostly Te Ika-a-Māui North Island, residual memory, misremembered, not remembered. And there are those who know the Imperial story only too well.
A Vocabulary first exhibited at Te Uru Waitākere Contemporary Gallery in 2021 and has since showed at Toi Tauranga Tauranga Art Gallery, Te Kōngahu Museum of Waitangi, MTG Hawke’s Bay Tai Ahuriri, and the National Army Museum Te Mata Toa.
{Suite} is pleased to present a selection of the works from this body of work alongside the artist book (Vapour Momenta Books, 2021) with He Mōteatea and essay by Dr. Rangihīroa Panoho.
