Kim Gurney
Senior Researcher, UK-RSA Bilateral Research Chair: Digital humanities chair in culture and technics
Kim’s expertise spans contemporary art, cultural geography and journalism, specialising in issues around public space and arts-based research. Her research over the past decade has focused upon ‘offspaces’ as urban indicators — from public space to artist studios, artist-led collectives, artisanal workshops, and backroom archives.
Four solo-authored books are emblematic – most recently Flipside: The Inadvertent Archive (2024). All of them make correlations between artistic thinking and everyday life to surface novel insights about navigating uncertain conditions – two set in Johannesburg, one in Cape Town, and one pan-African reflection.
Kim generally 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. 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 own art practice concerns disappearances and making restorative gestures including a nomadic curatorial platform, guerilla gallery. Her most recent exhibition project was ‘Tales of History Retold’ (2025), co-curated with Carlyn Strydom.
Before working at CHR, Kim spent over a decade as a Research Associate with African Centre for Cities at University of Cape Town and was affiliated for several years to Visual Identities in Art & Design (VIAD) at University of Johannesburg. She holds advanced degrees in cultural geography, fine art, and international journalism.
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.
Other key texts:
- Gurney, K. 15 June 2025. ‘Five indie art spaces in Africa worth knowing more about’. The Conversation, https://theconversation.com/5-indie-art-spaces-in-african-cities-worth-knowing-more-about-258009
- Gurney, K. 2024. ‘Plotform urbanism: How to do things with Art’, Other Network – a collaboration with eflux Architecture on ‘Friction’
- Gurney, K. Spring 2023. ‘Breathing Room: Working principles of independent art spaces in African cities’, African Arts, Vol. 56, No. 1, pp. 26-41. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1162/afar_a_00696
- Gurney, K. 2022. Epistemic Disobedience: Institution-building as artistic practice. Conference topic: “How does artistic research transform pedagogy and artistic practice in Africa?” Johannesburg: Arts Research Africa & University of the Witwatersrand, pp.157-168, http://hdl.handle.net/10539/35901
- Gurney, K. 2022. ‘After the fall: An Art of the Commons’, Shuddhashar, Issue 27, February 1
- Gurney, Kim, Neo Muyanga & Edgar Pieterse. 2022. ‘The Creative Politics of Legibility’, Public Culture. Vol. 34 (3), ‘Speculations’, pp. 515-535
- Gurney, K. November 2021. ‘The mogul, his meerkat and the meerkat’s second life’, e-flux Architecture, “Workplace” – A collaboration between e-flux Architecture and the Canadian Center for Architecture. Edited by Nick Axel, Albert Ferré, Nikolaus Hirsch & Megan Marin
- Gurney, K. 2020. Green Screen, A digital storymap ‘following the thing’ – a film set in the making and where it goes, telling a larger story about space and place from a workshop in Salt River, Cape Town
- Gurney, K. June 2020. ‘Artists help us leap into the unknown’, Africasacountry
- Gurney, K. 2017. ‘Zombie monument: Public art and performing the present’, Special issue: Urban Geography of the Arts. Pauline Guinard & G. Molina (eds.). Vol. 7, pp. 33-38
- Gurney, K. 2017. ‘Public Art Prospects in ‘Mzansi’s Golden Economy’. In: Public Art in Africa: Art and Urban Transformations in Douala – ebook. Edited by Iolanda Pensa et al. Geneve: MetisPresses, download available
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
Johannesburg as Imaginarium: Public Art and Placemaking in the City
On Wednesday, 11 March, the French Institute of South Africa (IFAS) and the Goethe-Institut Johannesburg will co-host a discussion titled Johannesburg as Imaginarium: Public Art and Placemaking in the City.
New Publication: Kim Gurney reviews Jay Pather’s edited volume, Restless Infections – Public Art and a Transforming City.
There is a double bind to writing about performance art, or live art as it is also called. Generally speaking, live art involves combinations of the body, time and space.
Residency Re-Sourced: Public Lecture by Kim Gurney
Kim Gurney will be giving an online keynote on Wednesday 5 August, for ‘Residency Re-sourced’, a collaborative project run by Goethe-Institut Nigeria.
Artists Forum: Future Forms: DIY Institution – Building
The Artists Forum connects scholarly exploration with the CHR’s Artist in Residency programme, so as to bring artists’ and humanistic study into a more intimate adjacency
‘5 indie art spaces in African cities worth knowing more about’, Kim Gurney in The Conversation
Kim Gurney’s latest publication for The Conversation discusses five indie art spaces in African cities worth knowing more about.
Publication: Instituting Worlds
The CHR is pleased to announce the publication of a chapter by Kim Gurney in an edited volume about architecture and islands, Instituting Worlds. The book, edited by Catharina Gabrielsson and Marko Jobst, is published by Routledge.
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
