1000 years of things: Five Years: 1998-2018

Marking Five Years’ 20th anniversary, 1000 Years of Things is a show about material and its accumulation, about the stuff that accretes to a project over a long period of time: documentation, recordings, publicity material, paperwork, publications, bank statements and bills, correspondence. In the case of Five Years this material hasn’t been sufficiently organized or historicized to constitute an archive – its form is disordered and dispersed, in scattered cupboards and shoe boxes, much of it stored on outdated media. Spanning more than 250 exhibitions and projects, a selection of this material will be presented publicly both inside and outside of the gallery. Artists and collectives, Five Years members and previous exhibitors will be invited to add to, edit and activate the collection. Performing with and within it, collaging it with new items and other collections, mixing its chronology to create new shared lines of interest we will present our archive as a stage on which earlier projects can be reassessed and new players added. Challenging the concept of an archive as a hidden space or a place of stasis and power, we hope to generate new agency by thawing items frozen in time.