walking forwards backwards explores the practice and traditions of weaving within contemporary social and economic systems.

Through a series of moving image works and performative actions, For any who come to take from here considers the home as a site of knowledge, refuge and isolation, asking what memories can be found in spaces we live and have lived in.

The Asia-Pacific Century: Part One is an open research space that will be at Enjoy from August 6 – August 20, 2016. The Asia-Pacific Century is co-curated by Emma Ng and Ioana Gordon-Smith and led by Bepen Bhana, Peter Brunt, Kerry Ann Lee, Local Time, Lana Lopesi, Ahilapalapa Rands, Balamohan Shingade, Melinda Webber and Anna-Marie White.

On June 4, 2000 the windows were removed and the doors of an upstairs room at 174 Cuba St were opened for the first exhibition of Enjoy Gallery. 

Latent Image* responds both to the material qualities of the gallery space and its past incarnation as a photographic studio. Architectural details are miniaturized, inverted, burnt back. The familiar becomes unfamiliar, like the black sky in a photographic negative.

Through physical and chemical processes, Jay Hutchinson’s elaborate hand-embroidered pieces recreate and relocate the quiet marks, colours and textures of Newtown, Wellington.

Dominant narratives around the economy tend to represent it as essentially capitalist—where waged work and the exchange of money are seen as the single most important parts of our economy. In these narratives, other forms of socio-economic exchange (such as bartering, gift-giving, sharing, cooperatives, foraging, and using common resources) are either dismissed as insignificant, or idealistic pipe dreams that could never work in contemporary society.

Enjoy is pleased to present a new installation by Johanna Mechen, our 2016 Summer Artist in Residence.

Beginning with a quest to video her vitreous eye floaters, Mechen explores the relationship between Optometry and Photography, weaving historical and contemporary elements of both practices with factual and fictitious discoveries.

Mike Heynes’ multi-channel video installation News of the Uruguay Round investigates the reason behind the ongoing lack of local content on our screens and airwaves.  

Enjoy is pleased to announce the recipient of our 2016 Summer Residency program, Johanna Mechen.

In association with Enjoy Feminisms at Enjoy Public Art Gallery, Wellington, November 12 - December 12, 2015.

With text by Pip Adam.

Feminism in Aotearoa/New Zealand and abroad is often represented in the mainstream media as a white middle-class issue focused around sex and career. But this barely touches the edges of the multiplicity of feminisms and how feminisms have affected all of our lives. This year the Enjoy Trust put out a proposal call for exhibition works, actions, and pieces for the Enjoy Occasional Journal which expand the discourse on feminisms. 

Death Workshop documents a workshop project Mori undertook with a group of student actors over the course of several months. The students were asked to imagine how they will die (not how they wished to die) and direct other student actors in enactments of these scenes as a short play.

Clear your head. Breathe. Inhale the air and clear your mind. Write what you know. This is my mind speaking to yours. What does it want to tell you?

"She was the standard," Garcia says, "so whenever we printed anything, we had to pull Shirley in. If Shirley looked good, everything else was OK. If Shirley didn't look so hot that day, we had to tweak something—something was wrong.”

Jersson Garcia

“It's incredible...It's all ours” is a statement that poses multiple scenarios, aligning with the mentality of first-seen, then first-owned. It is a statement that has, in the past, referred to the land, its gifts and also to women. European men who travelled to the Pacific Islands, such as Jack London and Bengt Daniellson, wrote whimsical reports on their encounters with young women living there, with an enamoured fervency that shows both an infatuation and unnervingly predatory focus.

Drawing on the early developments and success of the recent performance work Triumphs and Other Alternatives, this immersive installation invites different understandings of how material substances influence creative outcomes. Another Garden offers a new reading and landscape for materials once destined for the stage. No longer intended for part of a scene, the materials have been reconfigured to be experiential rather than performative, with new sound and light scapes created for the installation.

Mountain climbing is the oldest metaphor in the book for success, an analogy for conquering, a punch to sky in a kind of fuck-yeah triumph. 

Strange frequencies are channelled through personal narratives and poetic placeholders in Something felt, something shared. 

A Lonesome Scene… The lonely Tiger... Solitary Enlightenment... A Triumphant Rest…

A single scene stuck in a loop inside one texture… attached to only one moment... existing in its only world.