The Art of Public Space

‘The Art of Public Space: Curating and Re-imagining the Ephemeral City’ (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) follows a trilogy of artistic explorations of public space in Johannesburg, 'New Imaginaries' – through walking ('Shoe Shop'), new media (‘A.Maze.Interact' festival, now Fak’ugesi) and performance art ('In House’ and ‘African United Utopias’) – to posit ideas around common space and offer a riposte to art’s instrumentalisation in public policy.

Commendations:

“This book brings something new to the public space discourse that allows us to think beyond the specificity of Johannesburg. It indeed exposes the naturalised ways of thinking and talking about public space, which tend to privilege permanency and definition, while rendering invisible the processes by which public space is actually made. … Gurney re-politicises the debate in new ways, offering us critical tools to re-imagining and re-speak of public space in the city.”
--Kate Dawson, Africa at LSE Book Review, blogs.lse.ac.uk, May, 2016

"Regimes of segregation and inequality leave rigid marks on urban space that are difficult to undo. In this book, Kim Gurney analyzes a series of artistic interventions in the spaces of Johannesburg that challenged those marks. She masterfully shows how performances conceived in the spaces of the ordinary worked to undo rigidities of spatial separations and to forge alternative publics."
--Teresa Caldeira, University of California, Berkeley, US

"The Art of Public Space powerfully reiterates the ways in which urban actors do not inhabit worlds of preconceived social or subjective forms, but rather ever-shifting milieus where different ways of conceiving and enacting life intersect, and that artistic practice is a critical technology in re-imagining and reshaping these intersections. All technical practices conduct events, but artistic work is proving most salient in opening up urban contexts to events that anticipateand posit new ways of living together. Leveraging the multiplicity of performances that make up everyday Johannesburg, the artistic projects offered here attempt to reconfigure what its residents already see and experience but in ways that push it somewhere else, which collate and intensify these perceptions and experiences into new common grounds."
--AbdouMaliq Simone, Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Germany, and Goldsmiths College, University of London

" [...] an important text in [South Africa's] bid to grapple with ephemeral art, raising interesting discussions around definitions of value, public commons and the use of uncertainty and the unknown in art practice"
--Lloyd Gedye, The Con