Bruce Connew; A Vocabulary

Over several recent years, photographer and artist Bruce Connew has roamed the many memorials and gravestones of Aotearoa’s colonial wars to seek 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 is an abstract, narrative selection of images from an artist book of the same title, published concurrently with the exhibition. A Vocabulary (Vapour Momenta Books, 2021) is an artist book designed by Catherine Griffiths and Bruce Connew, with a mōteatea and essay by Dr. Rangihīroa Panoho.

Developed and toured by Waitakere Contemporary Gallery, Te Uru.