Flipside at the Cape Town Book Fair
Olga Speakes | Dr. Kim Gurney | Bongani Kona
The Norval Foundation: 03.11.24
The Norval Foundation's AVA Director, Olga Speakes, joined Flipside author Dr. Kim Gurney and lecturer Bongani Kona for a captivating discussion at the Cape Town Book Fair on Sunday, 3 November 2024.
As part of the fair's talks program, Down the Rabbit Hole: Artistic Adventures in the AVA Archive delved into the depths of Kim Gurney's Flipside. The conversation explored the book's unique perspective on South African art history drawing insights from the rich archives of the AVA.
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. Gurney follows the trail of very specific artefacts and where they might lead to assemble a multi-dimensional perspective on the invisible labour of curatorial work as well as the collective art of institution-building. The AVA Archive, dating roughly 25 years to either side of South Africa's 1994 democratic transition, also offers a compelling lens on the politics and poetics of larger societal transformations, and the inevitable entanglements between (public) space, imagination and city futures.
Copies of the limited edition book are available for R590 via the AVA. To reserve your copy of the book contact us on:
Olga Speakes joined the AVA team as the Director in 2023 after practicing as an independent curator for over 8 years. She had curated exhibitions at the AVA, the National Gallery of Zimbabwe in Bulawayo, at the Constitution Hill in Johannesburg and at Spier in Stellenbosch and had collaborated on curatorial projects at the Iziko South African National Gallery in Cape Town (Women’s Work and Penny Siopis Retrospective). For a number of years Olga was a contract and guest lecturer in art exhibition histories and public display at the Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town.
Dr Kim Gurney is a writer, researcher, and visual artist. Her writing style is inflected by a former life as a journalist and seeks out backstage narratives linking art to everyday urban life and city futures. Kim is widely published in a range of genres, from articles to storymaps to artist books. She is also the author of four non-fiction books: ‘The Art of Public Space: Curating and Re-imagining the Ephemeral City’; ‘August House is Dead, Long Live August House! The Story of a Johannesburg Atelier’; ‘Panya Routes – Independent art spaces in Africa’, and (most recently) ‘Flipside: The Inadvertent Archive’. Kim lives in Cape Town where she thinks a lot about offspaces and runs a tiny one from a backyard shed. More: www.linktr.ee/kimjg
Bongani Kona is a PhD candidate and lecturer in the Department of Historical Studies at the University of the Western Cape. His writing has appeared in a variety of places including Chimurenga, Safe House: Explorations in Creative Nonfiction, The Daily Assortment of Astonishing Things and Other Stories, The Baffler and BBC Radio 4. Most recently, he edited Our Ghosts were Once People: Stories on Death and Dying.
