Light, shadow and whakapapa shape new Courtenay Place exhibition

Tuesday, 7 April 2026

Hendrix Hennessy‑Ropiha (Ngāti Kahungunu, Ngāti Raukawa) is a Wellington‑based photographer whose work explores social and political currents within Aotearoa, using art as a lens for reflection and critique. A Massey University graduate (Bachelor of Design, Photography, 2021), he is currently completing an MA at Otago University.

His latest exhibition, Pahemata, presented in the Courtenay Place light boxes, continues his investigation into memory, identity, and the ways public space can hold collective stories.

Pahemata is named for your Nan and extends to others who have passed. How did honouring those relationships shape the way you approached photographing light and shadow in the city?

I guess the biggest thing was how they occupied my thoughts while I was making this work. My Nan passed over 10 years ago now but I’ve thought about her every single day since then. I grew up with her and my Grandad and I really miss them, I miss everyone named in these photographs. Those feelings come and go and are sometimes brought up by the smallest things or in the most unexpected times and places. I think those relationships of coming and going, permanence and impermanence, which are part of these photographs reminded me of how these feelings associated with grief can be so fleeting and unexpected as well.

You describe these moments of light as “hints towards the presence of something else.” What does that presence feel like to you when you’re behind the camera?

I think that can kind of be more than one thing. Being behind the camera really changes the way you engage with the world. For me being under a dark cloth looking at this kind of strange, kind of beautiful upside down version of the world is a really particular thing. It’s just you, in this tiny dark bubble you’ve created around yourself, illuminated solely by whatever you chose to point the camera towards. That way of engaging with something shifts how you’re present in a situation.

I guess the presence I was meaning though was more of the often unseen or untold histories of a place. Who was here before us, what might have happened here, but also the presence we bring with us into these spaces.

Each photograph carries the name of someone important to you. How did you choose which images aligned with which people?

I didn’t really think much about which image would best represent each person or anything like that. I knew I wanted my Nan to be first and that was kind of it, but then when they had names attached to them they kind of started having different relationships with each other. It was kind of like, oh these two are friends so they can go together, or they’re cousins, or these two didn’t get along the best so let’s keep them separate, which is completely random to anyone else but made some weird sort of sense to me at the time.

Courtenay Place is a busy, ever changing urban environment. What drew you to make work about the intangible — the fleeting, the ungraspable — in such a concrete setting?

I guess I like the analogies. Sometimes these little moments happen that bring up a memory. I feel like these are often fleeting and sometimes inexplainable but they remind you of something, of someone, and that you miss them. The last times, the what ifs, remember whens and maybe in another lifes. We’re all moving through these spaces, in a similar manner to the fleeting moments of light in these photographs, will the walls of these streets remember us when we’re gone? Probably not, but if we’re lucky our stories and memories will continue on, through the whānau and friends we all have to inevitably leave behind.

Your practice often engages with social and political issues. How does Pahemata sit within that wider body of work?

I guess this has been similar in a lot of ways even though the images are maybe less literal in what they convey. They still touch on similar topics to some of my other work, like how we experience and navigate grief after losing someone we care about.

It’s been really interesting hearing what other people take away from them. The what are we looking at, or why is it here, and sometimes just the feelings the images evoke for them.

What's something people don't know about you?

I spelled my name wrong for 15 years without realising.