Kim Gurney has been leading her own research projects within academic institutions since around 2012, largely focused upon independent art spaces and their understories. She regularly follows artworks, artists, archives and other offspaces where counterfactual imagination is at work, and is often asked to share her ideas around the working principles of pan-African offspaces as well as art in public space.
Kim has held various research affiliations, most recently with Centre for Humanities Research (University of the Western Cape) and a long-term association with African Centre for Cities (University of Cape Town). In this capacity, she has published four solo-authored books that variously link contemporary art, city futures, and the public sphere - her key academic interests. She has developed in her work a long-standing interest in public space as common space, with a special focus on public and performative art, independent art spaces, and DIY-DIT institution-building.
Much of her work concerns articulating a non-pecuniary value for art, and how art can intervene in fields other than its own. Her PhD explored art as a vector of value, or how art comes to matter, positing an ecological model that puts public interest first.
Kim holds four advanced degrees - in Journalism (B.Journ, Rhodes), International Journalism (MA, Univ of London), Fine Art (BAFA, UCT), and Cultural Geography (PhD, UCT) - two of them awarded with Distinction.
‘New Imaginaries’ (2012)
Photo: K. Gurney
Download full list of publications
Key academic outputs: Orcid ID
Audio for book launches: Mixcloud
Videos of talks: Vimeo
Selected public talks:
*AVA symposium talk about the making of ‘Flipside: The Inadvertent Archive’.
*Invited speaker [forthcoming], Scratching the Surface seminar and workshop on histories, materialities and temporalities of the surfaces of monuments and statues in space, at University of Copenhagen, Denmark, 5-6 Dec 2024. Talk title: “Zombie monuments: The second lives of a voided plinth and a respawning nose.”
*Keynote speaker: ‘Researching Public Art’ international conference, hosted by Public Art Agency Sweden at The Royal institute of Art, Stockholm, 11 October 2018. Talk title: Seeing pink elephants: Performing the city
*Keynote speaker, ‘Being (in) Public: Encounters - Outside Place / Inner Space’, international symposium, B-beyond & Belfast School of Art, Ulster University, 5 April 2017. Talk title: ‘Performing the Present’
*Podcast - May Day - about the performative afterlife of the Rhodes plinth at UCT, which is in effect a rolling artwork:
*Panel participant at ECAS 2015, Sorbonne, Paris, Session title: ‘Dead Monuments’ convened by Professor Gavin Younge, 8-10 July 2015. Title of paper: ‘The Disappeared: Missing Artworks Task Force’
*Keynote speaker & symposium organiser, ‘New Imaginaries/ New Publics’, co-hosted by & Goethe-Institut Johannesburg, 21 February 2013,
Talk title: ‘Nomadic Notions: Footloose in a Fictive City’ (video available upon request)
*5th Urban Dialogue – Urban Reimaginations through African Cultural Infrastructures hosted by GoDown Arts Centre in Nairobi, which featured Panya Routes as a springboard for a larger discussion.
*Invited speaker for ‘Cities in Development: Art in public spaces’ at University of Leuven, Belgium. Talk title: ‘Panya routes: Independent art spaces as urban indicators’, 10 December 2019. Part of an ongoing debate series on critical issues regarding cities of the global South, focusing in particular on how urban dwellers’ agency invents urban futures. Alongside Sandrine Colard, curator of the Lubumbashi Biennale.
*TV interview for In Focus by Northern Visions filmed on the occasion of delivering a keynote address for Being in Public, a performance art symposium at Belfast School of Art, Ulster University, 2017.
*Podcast - interviewed by Nancy Richards on Panya Routes, for ‘People’s stories & Books’:
*Local TV for Belfast - interview on performance art and public art
Key bodies of work
Flipside
This archival exploration into 50 years of records stashed in an attic led to a sole-authored book. Flipside: The Inadvertent Archive (2024) takes the reader on a thematic journey through rooms in the architectural plans of a former house turned gallery in 1971. It explores the politics and poetics of an analogue archive, pertaining to the Association for Visual Arts (AVA) - one of South Africa’s longest standing arts organisations and non-profit galleries.
Gurney, Kim. 2024. Flipside: The Inadvertent Archive. Johannesburg, Lagos, Frankfurt: iwalewabooks. Copy editors Karen Press & iwalewabooks. Graphic design by mind the gap! (Frankfurt). Available internationally via iwalewabooks - physical and e-book. Also locally from AVA Gallery and all independent book stores in South Africa. The e-book is open access for researchers - contact the author.
See also:
*AVA Symposium - talking about the making of ‘Flipside’ (see video on left)
*Gurney, K., N. Muyanga & E. Pieterse. 31 October 2022. The Creative Politics of Legibility. Public Culture, Part III Speculations, Vol. 34 (3), pp. 515-535.
Platform/Plotform
This project resulted in a solo-authored book, Panya Routes: Independent art spaces in Africa (2022). This book investigates the shared working principles of pan-African offspaces (artistic thinking) by correlating their curatorial strategies with everyday urban innovations.
Gurney, Kim. 2022. Panya Routes. Independent art spaces in Africa. Berlin & Lausanne: Motto Books. Edited by Mika Hayashi Ebbesen. Graphic design by Márcia Novais (Porto). Available internationally from Motto Books, Amazon, and local independent book stores. Book announcement
See also:
*Gurney, K. Spring 2023. ‘Breathing Room: Working Principles of Independent Art Spaces in African Cities’. African Arts, Vol. 56, No. 1, pp. 26-41.
*Gurney, K. 2024. ‘Plotform urbanism: How to do things with Art’, Other Network - a collaboration with eflux Architecture on ‘Friction’
*Gurney, K. June 2020. ‘Artists help us leap into the unknown’ in Africasacountry [online]
*Gurney, K. September 2022. Epistemic Disobedience: Institution-building as artistic practice.. In: ‘How does artistic research transform pedagogy and art practice in Africa?’. Arts Research Africa 2022 & University of the Witwatersrand. (Conference Proceedings). Open access article, Conference proceedings
*Gurney, K. 2021. ‘DIY institutions, artistic thinking and common space’, Barcelona: Centre de Cultura Contemporania de Barcelona (CCCB) – invited article series on public space
*Panelist, 5th Urban Dialogue hosted by GoDown Arts Centre in Nairobi, a dialogue about cultural infrastructures in Africa - with ‘Panya Routes’ as springboard for discussion, November 2022
*Podcast: Kim Gurney: On Panya Routes – ‘People’s Stories and Books’ produced by Nancy Richards. Available on Spotify, 2022
*Invited speaker, ‘Cities in Development: Art in public spaces’, University of Leuven, Belgium. Talk title: Panya routes: Independent art spaces as urban indicators. 10 December 2019.
August House
This body of work resulted in a book of creative non-fiction,August House is Dead, Long Live August House! The Story of a Johannesburg Atelier, 2017. Johannesburg: Fourthwall Books. It spatializes the storyline in a narrative ‘triptych’ - the studio, the artworks, and their afterlife - by moving floor-by-floor through an innercity building while its future is in limbo. At heart, it’s about how artists deal with uncertainty. The book is available from independent book stores (South Africa) including Book Lounge, Clarkes, Proto at A4 Arts, David Krut Publishing & Love Books.
See also:
*Gurney, K. 2019. From End to End. A Storymap of Viral Sculptures. This digital storymap (geolocation, visuals and text) follows the surprising trajectories of a series of viral sculptures from a Johannesburg studio into private and public settings as part of a broader study on art as a vector of value.
*Gurney, K. 07 Sep 2016. ‘Warp and Woof: Stalking Art from End to End’. In: Critical Arts: South-North Cultural and Media Studies. Vol. 30, Issue 3: Art, ethnography and practice-led research, pp. 411-427.
*Gurney, K. 2019. PhD thesis. ‘The mattering of African contemporary art: Value and valuation from the studio to the collection’, University of Cape Town: Cape Town. August House is one of the case studies in this thesis.
Mbongeni Buthelezi in his August House studioPhoto: Anthea Pokroy
Gordon Froud in his August House studioPhoto: Anthea Pokroy
Gibson Khumalo at his August House officePhoto: Anthea Pokroy
Power Mazibuko at August HousePhoto: Anthea Pokroy
Jacki McInnes in her August House studioPhoto: Anthea Pokroy
Bie Venter in her August House loftPhoto: Anthea Pokroy
Public Space/ New Imaginaries
In 2012, I reflected on an art trilogy, New Imaginaries (2012) by Goethe Institut, in which artists in Johannesburg explored public space throughout the year - via walking, gaming/new media, and performance art. The result was a monograph offering a riposte to a prevailing creative economies argument in public policy and a case for the value of art in public space and performative interventions - as a tool of urban commoning.
Gurney, K. 2015. The Art of Public Space: Curating and Re-imagining the Ephemeral City. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Available internationally from Palgrave - including e-book and individual chapters. Also via Amazon (Kindle).
See also:
*’New Imaginaries, New Publics’, a symposium as prelude to the book - programmed by Kim for ACC and hosted at Goethe-Institut Johannesburg. Video recordings of the presentations are available upon request. Download programme of speakers Download event Rationale
*Gurney, K. 2013. ‘Sounding the City: Urban Performance in Johannesburg’. In: Kunstforum International, Issue 223 (Oct-Dec): pp. 94-107 - in German
*View a short documentary about ‘New Imaginaries’, the trilogy of art events exploring public space upon which The Art of Public Space is based, on youtube.
*Gurney, K. 2013. ‘Abracadabra’. In: E. Pieterse & A. Simone (eds). Rogue Urbanism: Emergent African Cities. Auckland Park: Jacana, pp. 421-425.
*Gurney, K. 2013. ‘Ethnography of a Flame’. In: Critical Arts. South-North Cultural and Media Studies, 27(4), pp.439-443.
*Gurney, K. 2012. ‘Mzansi’s Golden Economy’ and performance art. In: The Johannesburg Salon, Vol. pp. 98-101.
*Gurney, K. 2023. ‘Concrete Philosophy: Artistic migrations in the public sphere’. In: Bruce Arnott: Into the Megatext. Edited by Mari Lecanides-Arnott and Sven Christian. Cape Town: Print Matters, pp. 92-101.
*Keynote speaker: ‘Researching Public Art’ international conference, hosted by Public Art Agency Sweden at The Royal institute of Art, Stockholm, 11 October 2018. Talk title: Seeing pink elephants: Performing the city
*Keynote speaker, ‘Being (in) Public: Encounters - Outside Place / Inner Space’, international symposium, B-beyond & Belfast School of Art, Ulster University, 5 April 2017. Talk title: ‘Performing the Present’
*Keynote speaker, ‘New Imaginaries/ New Publics’, co-hosted by & Goethe-Institut Johannesburg, 21 February 2013. Talk title: ‘Nomadic Notions: Footloose in a Fictive City’ (video available upon request)
Green Screen
This ongoing project began life at University of the Western Cape, by following closely a film set in the making - how it is assembled, where it goes, and what it ultimately becomes. This led to various outputs, from paintings to a digital storymap and articles. I had a book in mind but it became a variety of different kinds of outputs instead - a storymap, painting series, photobook, journal articles and an essay. It continues to generate new storylines.
Gurney, K. 2020. Green Screen - A digital storymap of creative nonfiction that follows the life of a film set assembled for a commercial to tell a larger story about counterfactual imagination and city futures from the artisanal perspective of the workshop floor. Salt River, Cape Town. Published by Centre for Humanities Research.
See also:
*Gurney, K. 2020. ‘Offscreen: Making it and faking it’. In: Writingplace,
Readings(s) and Writing(s): Unfolding Processes of Transversal Writing, Vol. 3, pp.110-130.
*Gurney, K. 2021. ‘The mogul, his meerkat and the meerkat’s second life’. In: e-flux Architecture, Workplace - A collaboration between e-flux Architecture and the Canadian Center for Architecture. Editors: Nick Axel, Albert Ferré, Nikolaus Hirsch and Megan Marin.
Zombie Monuments
The performative afterlife of the plinth that once held the toppled statue of Cecil Rhodes is the basis of Kim’s ongoing research project about public space as common space and art’s potential role as a vector of refusal and reimagination.
Since 2015, I have been tracking the performative afterlife of a voided plinth on University of Cape Town public campus after the 2015 toppling of a statue of Cecil Rhodes. The plinth is not in fact empty at all but hosts a continuous stream of spontaneous and unsanctioned interventions by students, artists and the public. This body of work speaks to the concept of public space as common space - belonging to nobody and to everybody and hence as contested, negotiated and performed anew. This work is ongoing, following a rolling series of unsanctioned interventions as well as other ricochets in public space. Here is a good summary:
Gurney, K. July 2018. ‘Zombie monument: Public art and performing the present’, Cities, Special issue - Urban Geography of the Arts. Guinard, P. & Molina, G. (Eds). Vol. 7, pp. 33-38. DOI.
See also:
*Gurney, K. 2024 [forthcoming]. Invited speaker: ‘Scratching the Surface: The histories, materialities and temporalities of the surfaces of monuments and statues in public space’ at University of Copenhagen, Denmark. Talk title: ‘Zombie Monuments: The second lives of a voided plinth and a respawning nose’, 5 Dec.
*Gurney, K. 2022. ‘Zombie monument: A visual journal’ – The performative afterlife of the Rhodes Plinth (2015-2020, ongoing series). In: Panya Routes – Independent art spaces in Africa. Berlin & Lausanne: Motto, pp. 27-32. Narrative companion: ‘Second life’, pp. 33-48.
*Gurney, K. 2022. ‘After the fall: An Art of the Commons’ in Shuddhashar, Issue 27, February 1
*Gurney, K. July 2020. ‘The second lives of zombie monuments’ in Africasacountry [online]
*Podcast, 2020. ‘MayDay: Decolonisation, power and the public space’ produced by Bozar in Brussels. “…In this episode, we take inspiration from South Africa, where #RhodesMustFall has created a space for unofficial rolling artwork, where anyone can take the stage. Writer and artist Kim Gurney, who has examined the case up close, shares her experiences with us.” Available: Spotify.
*Gurney, K. December 2015. ‘Performing the Present: The Second Life of Zombie Monuments’ in Art Africa, Issue 02, Cape Town: Bell-Roberts, pp. 14-17
*Gurney, K. 2014. Article about spatial justice in two Cape Town townships - Khayelitsha and Dunoon - focusing upon the crucial issue of sanitation services. Published in Cityscapes magazine, Issue No. 5, which asks whether design can save the city, Edge Design. With photographer David Harrison, pp.34-49.