Flipside

Flipside: The Inadvertent Archive (2024, iwalewabooks) explores half a century of documents in a paper archive belonging to Cape Town’s longest running arts association and non-profit gallery, the Association for Visual Arts (AVA). The narrative structure, inspired by architectural documents in the archive stored in the AVA’s attic, leads the reader on a thematic journey from room to room in the former home that now houses the AVA. It follows the trail of specific archival artefacts that tell a larger entangled tale. Richter Huis, with a story of its own, is the long-term home of the AVA and its predecessor body, since 1971. Its uncatalogued archival collection holds a vast array of documents which comprise the author’s source material – from exhibition information and correspondence to meeting minutes and financial records.

In Flipside, 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.

The book is published by iwalewabooks (Johannesburg, Frankfurt & Lagos), designed by Mind the Gap! (Karl-Heinz Best) and edited by Karen Press (CT) and iwalewabooks. It was produced in collaboration with University of the Western Cape’s Centre for Humanities Research, where the author now works as a Senior Researcher.

The limited edition physical book, which is designed bespoke as a physical artefact, is available from ava@admin.co.za

The e-book version is available open access.

Commendation:

"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)