Kim Gurney
Senior researcher, Digital Arts
Kim Gurney is a Senior Researcher in the NRF/British Academy SA-UK Bilateral Digital Humanities Chair in Culture and Technics at CHR. Her expertise spans contemporary art, urban studies and journalism/ media, specialising in issues around public space.
Kim has published four single-author books (listed below) making correlations between art and everyday life to surface novel insights about fast-changing cities of the South – most recently, ‘Flipside: The Inadvertent Archive’ (2024). Broader preoccupations concern art and value, or why art matters as a vector of politics and poetics, and the significance of artistic thinking for other fields and contexts.
Kim’s research over the past decade has largely focused upon ‘offspaces’ as urban indicators and generative sites of understories and social imaginaries — artist collectives, artisanal workshops, artist studios, urban commoning, and overlooked archives. She reads against the grain for lesser known voices that may be obscured, a sensibility informed by a former life as a journalist before pivoting into the artworld.
Kim is still a writer at heart. She increasingly approaches publishing as part of an expanded artistic practice that concerns disappearances and making restorative gestures. Notable curated shows are ‘Sounding Out’ at the Bag Factory (2012), which included sound artworks broadcast on a pirate radio station, and ‘Cape Town Under: The Third Voice’ (2013), a collab with Pauline Theart comprising site-specific lullabies performed from tunnels and permeating public space above through manhole covers and a trapdoor. Kim has held two solos, participates annually on group shows and runs ad hoc a nomadic platform, guerilla gallery.
Kim previously worked at CHR in different research capacities for a cumulative five years, and was a Research Associate at African Centre for Cities (University of Cape Town) for over a decade. She is currently an external expert for the European Commission on public space for citizen engagement.
Key publications:
- ‘Flipside: The Inadvertent Archive’ (2024, iwalewabooks) explores half a century of documents in a paper archive belonging to Cape Town’s longest running arts association and non-profit gallery, the Association for Visual Arts (AVA);
- ‘Panya Routes: Independent art spaces in Africa’ (2022, Motto Books) makes correlations between artistic strategies and everyday city life to propose five key working principles that pan-African independent art spaces hold in common in their DIY-DIT institution building;
- ‘August House is Dead, Long Live August House– The story of a Johannesburg Atelier’ (2017, Fourthwall Books) follows the trajectories of artworks and residents to render the entangled inner life of a studio building as a lens on uncertainty and larger urban transformation; &
- ‘The Art of Public Space: Curating and Re-imagining the Ephemeral City’ (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) follows a trilogy of artistic explorations of public space, New Imaginaries – through walking (‘Shoe Shop’), new media (A.Maze festival, now Fak’ugesi) and performance art (‘In House’ and ‘African United Utopias’) – to posit ideas around common space and a riposte to art’s financialisation.
Research outputs: https://orcid.org/0009-0008-9463-0738
More info: www.linktr.ee/kimjg
Flipside Free epub:
Audio file from book launch held on 9 March 2024 at AVA Gallery,
author in conversation with Premesh Lalu
Related News
Flipside: The inadvertent Archive, by Kim Gurney
Architectural plans of a former house inspire the narrative structure of a new book by Kim Gurney, called Flipside: The inadvertent Archive, which takes the reader on a thematic journey from room to room as it follows the trail of specific archival artefacts lodged in the building’s attic.
Publication announcement: Dr Kim Gurney, ‘Epistemic Disobedience’.
Institution-building as artistic practice is the topic of a paper published by the CHR’s Dr Kim Gurney, as part of artistic research conference proceedings. ‘Epistemic Disobedience’ posits Nafasi Art Space in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, as a paradigmatic example of independent art spaces in Africa and their key working principles.
New Publication: Into the Megatext
The CHR’s Dr Kim Gurney has contributed a chapter to a comprehensive book about the oeuvre of Bruce Arnott (1938-2018) – artist, academic and former director of The Michaelis School of Fine Art at UCT.
Flipside: The Inadvertent Archive
The South African Contemporary History and Humanities Seminar is pleased to announce that Kim Gurney will be presenting “Flipside: The Inadvertent Archive” on 22 June 2021 at 14:00.
List of Articles (2016-present)
Staff and Fellows of the Centre for Humanities Research regularly publish articles and reviews in local and international journals, applying the centre’s intellectual inquiries across a wide range of disciplines and interests.
Mayday – Decolonisation: power and the public space
CHR Next Generation Fellow Kim Gurney was interviewed for a podcast by Bozar Centre for Fine Arts in Brussels, on the topic of decolonisation and the public space.
Sets & Devices
Dr Kim Gurney, Next Generation scholar at the CHR, has created a limited edition photobook about life in the artisanal workshop of Sets & Devices in Salt River, Cape Town.
Green Screen
Green Screen, a newly launched work of creative nonfiction, follows the life of a film set created for a commercial by a team of artisans in Salt River, Cape Town, and how it morphs into a surprising series of second lives. The reader navigates this digital storymap online through a series of geolocations, visuals and text, authored by Kim Gurney and published by CHR.
Art, public space, and cities of the South
Cities in Development: Between Dystopia and Utopia
Seminar: Okechukwu Nwafor
Funeral Poster and Pre-Funeral Visual Economy in southeastern Nigeria
From platform to plotform: Artistic thinking in spaces of flux
This session shares work in progress on an African Centre for Cities (ACC) research project led by Kim Gurney called Platform/ Plotform to help forward future work and interdisciplinary outputs
Africa as Concept and Method: Emancipation, Decolonization, Freedom
The Consortium of Humanities Centres and Institutes (CHCI) Africa Workshop 2019 was hosted in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, with scholars from the CHR attending.
Re-Imagining as Destruction and Creation
Next Generation Scholar Kim Gurney to speak at Norval Foundation Symposium
