Join ACC and the Michaelis School of Fine Art for a lunchtime lecture by Dr Kim Gurney on her latest book Panya Routes: Independent art spaces in Africa, on Thursday, 31 August 2023, 13:00-14:00 at the Michaelis Lecture Theatre.
In this public talk, Kim will share the innovative working principles that independent art spaces in fast-changing cities in Africa have in common as they navigate conditions of uncertainty and accelerated flux.
These key principles are at the heart of her latest book, Panya Routes: Independent art spaces in Africa (2022), produced from research conducted whilst formerly affiliated to UCT’s African Centre for Cities (ACC).
Kim made correlations between curatorial strategies and everyday urban innovations to surface these findings. The featured spaces span five different countries: GoDown Art Centre (Nairobi, Kenya), ANO Institute of Arts & Knowledge (Accra, Ghana), Townhouse Gallery (Cairo, Egypt), Zoma Museum (Addis Ababa, Ethiopia), and Nafasi Art Space (Dar es Salaam, Tanzania). They all self-assemble infrastructures of various kinds through refusals and reimaginations, with implications for new modes of institution-building and thinking about city futures.
About the book
WHEN | Thursday, 31 August
TIME | 13:00-14:00
VENUE | Michaelis Lecture Theatre, Hiddingh Campus
BIO
Kim Gurney is a researcher, writer and visual artist. She is the author of three books: Panya Routes: Independent art spaces in Africa (Motto, 2022), August House is Dead, Long Live August House! The Story of a Johannesburg Atelier (Fourthwall, 2017), and The Art of Public Space: Curating and Re imagining the Ephemeral City (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). Kim is currently based at the Centre for Humanities Research (CHR) at the University of the Western Cape, working on Flipside: The Inadvertent Archive (in production).