Kim Gurney, a Next Generation Scholar in the CHR, has been invited to give an opening talk for a Nordic research conference on public art organised by the Public Art Agency Sweden together with a number of Swedish universities and museums. The aim is to inspire new research and collaborations in the expanded field of public art, map ongoing projects and missing components. Kim’s talk, Seeing pink elephants: performing the city, engages the artistic principle of performativity in the urban fabric in particular relating to disappearances of different sorts. These make evident deeper voids in society while also pointing to contemporary art’s capacity to radically re-imagine and even recalibrate the public sphere. The conference, called Researching Public Art, will be held at The Royal Institute of Art (KKH) on 11-12 October.
Public Art Agency Sweden
Na Ku Randza (‘I love you’) (2011). A public intervention by Center for Historical Re-enactments as part of Art in Troubled Times, with mural to Gito Baloi by Breeze Yoko in progress on right. Doornfontein, Johannesburg.
Tracking the performative afterlife of a voided plinth in Cape Town (2015–).
Mobile museum designed by Latifah Iddriss outside the ANO institute of art and knowledge in Accra, Ghana (2018), currently exploring future museums.
