Flipside: The Inadvertent Archive (2024)

by Kim Gurney | R590 Ex. Shipping

This book takes the reader on a thematic journey through the rooms of a former house in Cape Town that Association for Visual Arts (AVA) has, since 1971, called home. The architectural records that inspire this narrative structure are lodged in the AVA Archive, comprising a vast array of physical documents of care, to which Flipside creatively responds. This collection spans apartheid and South Africa’s democratic era, coinciding with AVA’s own redirection as an autonomous organisation in 1995, to tell a larger sociopolitical tale. Gurney follows the trail of ‘inadvertent archive’ – unexpected or fugitive artefacts that startle, diverge, or surprise, to see where they might lead. In so doing, Flipside surfaces the invisible custodial labour in AVA’s double act of exhibition making (as a non-profit gallery) and institution building (as an association) -- from the backroom perspective. Her narrative, interrupted by voices from the stacks, deliberately links space and (re)imagination to reject structural discontinuities and show how interlinked things truly are.

"As Sara Ahmed reminds us, while certain kinds of institutions might hold an assumed stability, what is often overlooked is the ‘instituting’ aspect of that which is ‘instituted’. Ahmed is therefore drawing our attention to institutions as always both ‘verbs’ and ‘nouns’ simultaneously (2012). A journey into an institutional archive is in many ways an confrontation with the making of the establishment itself. Gurney’s Flipside is a close and deep dive into the plurality of the AVA archives, which speaks directly to the active history of ‘instituting’, and the many shapes and forms it has taken in parallel to the political history of art institutions in South Africa more generally. The visually compelling layout allows readers a direct engagement with the materiality of the archive itself. These excerpts range from curatorial correspondence, to meeting minutes with hand-written commentary, side notes, schedules, invitations, and artworks alongside renovation plans and photographs of the documents. We are invited to travel into the interiors of documents, always cognisant of the places and world in which they are situated. In Gurney’s situating of these closely read selections and fugitive tangents, carefully reproduced to elicit an embodied and visual archival encounter, the reader is witness to the multi-dimensional dark-rooms of history in all its complexity and plurality.”
- Huda Tayob, Architectural Studies, University of Manchester (2024)

Flipside is independently published by iwalewabooks (Johannesburg, Frankfurt & Lagos). The book is designed bespoke by Mind the gap! (Karl-Heinz Best) in Frankfurt and edited by Karen Press (Cape Town) & iwalewabooks.

Flipside is available for local collection at AVA Gallery, 35 Church Street, Cape Town. We also offer local and international shipping for an additional fee. A member of our team will contact you shortly after purchasing to coordinate your collection or provide a custom shipping quote and delivery timeline.

For sale inquiries, contact admin@ava.co.za

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. Kim is a Senior Researcher at the Centre for Humanities Research, University of the Western Cape. More: www.linktr.ee/kimjg

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