There is a difference between reading about something and hearing something, an irreducible difference between being told about something and seeing something. The difference is our affective responses when the senses are triggered more directly.

Dr Kirsty Baker, Curator of a new exhibition at the City Gallery Wellington opens her exhibition essay with this quote from Teju Cole that resonates with oral history work where we are concerned with making meaning from spoken narratives, what is said and what is left unsaid. The gaps and the silences in an oral history can be as significant as the words spoken. So in this exhibition which is concerned with histories and experiences that are not part of the collective narrative.

The quote comes from: Teju Cole, ‘Ethics’ in Black Paper: Writing in a dark time – Chicago The University of Chicago press 2021, p197 quoted in Memory Lines, City Gallery Wellington, Te Whare Toi, March – June 2024.