Gregory Sholette, Danna Vajda, Darra Greenwald & Josh MacPhe, Grant Corbishley & Malcom Doidge, Matt Whitwell, Bryce Galloway, Johan Lundh, Lee Harrop, Murray Hewitt, Oliver Ressler, Yevgeniy Fiks, White Fungus, Maureen Conner, Olga Kopenkina, Jeremy Booth, Jeffrey Skoller, Ellen Rothenberg.

A public art project of Gregory Sholette's Wellington Collaboratorium, Winter Residency at Enjoy. The Archive is installed at Enjoy, and has also infiltrated Quilters Bookshop (35 Ghuznee St), Arty Bees Books (106 Manners St), and Wellington Central Library.

"The cultural economy of art is dependent upon a sphere of hidden social production involving cooperative networks and collaborative production-systems of gift exchange, unremunerated group labour, collective forms of practice-all of which resemble a species of missing mass or cultural dark that nonetheless anchors aesthetic value within the formal art world. Despite being entangled with this other, shadowy productivity, the art world refuses to acknowledge its presence. Recently, this relationship began to radically change. Thanks in large part to the spread of digital networks dark matter is getting brighter. The once-hidden archive has split open, its ragged contents are spilling out into view. This missing cultural mass is both a metaphor of something vast, unnamable and essentially inert, as well as a phantasmagoric proposition for what might be possible at this moment of epistemological crisis in the arts and structural crisis in global capital. The Imaginary Archive is an installation that explores this realm including collectivised and collaborative cultural practices that have been at the centre of this shift in dark matter from dark to light. Graphics, text-based artworks, imaginary books and other speculative objects produced by the artist along with other collaborators explore the splintering of cultural memory into a series of alternative historical possibilities and desires. Ultimately this installation/research project asks the following question: How are socially-based cultural practices perceived, shaped, limited, or liberated by their relation to historical memory?"

(Gregory Sholette, 2010)

Image: Art work by Ellen Rothenberg, installed at Enjoy as part of Gregory Sholette's An Imaginary Archive. Photograph courtesy of Enjoy.
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Sholette is a New York-based artist, writer, and founding member of the artists' collectives Political Art Documentation/Distribution and REPOhistory. He is also the co-author of several key publications:Collectivism After Modernism: The Art of Social Imagination after 1945 with Blake Stimson (2007), and The Interventionists: A Users Manual for the Creative Disruption of Everyday Life with Nato Thompson (2004, 2006).

Sholette's residency is made possible through a partnership between Enjoy and Dr. Sondra Bacharach, Senior Lecturer in the School of History Philosophy Political Science and International Relations, Victoria University of Wellington. The project is generously supported by Wellington City Council, the Marsden Fund, Victoria University of Wellington School of Design, Wellington City Library, Quilters Bookshop, Arty Bees Bookshop, Creative New Zealand, Adam Art Gallery, Massey University School of Fine Arts, Radio Active, and Datastream.