Zoom interview with Bruce Connew - Saturday 27 February 2021 at 11:00am

Join us in the third of the PhotoForum Zoom Interview series:
Andy Spain in conversation with photographer Bruce Connew

Bruce Connew - A Vocabulary

Bruce Connew's latest project unpicks the vocabulary of texts on memorials and gravestones of the colonial wars. In doing so he examines the semiotics of colonisation.

  “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? I quietly push forward. It was not the only occasion this phenomenon manifested while roaming the battles of Aotearoa’s reprehensible colonial wars. The memory of that memory has not grown pale.

Over several recent years, not the least abstractedly, I’ve roamed more, this time after the many memorials and gravestones for the dead of these wars, or more specifically, the texts on these testaments to folly. A vocabulary of colonisation.” Bruce Connew

To register for this 45 minute Zoom conversation and for the opportunity to ask your own questions email photoforumnz@gmail.com before Saturday 27 February 2021.