Kim Gurney is a writer, researcher and visual artist based in Cape Town, South Africa. Her writing, which crosses genre but favours long-form creative non-fiction, is inflected by a former life as a journalist and News Editor and often seeks out backstage narratives or lesser known tales. She increasingly approaches publishing as artistic practice. Kim is the author of three books, which also reflect her research curiosities: ‘Panya Routes: Independent art spaces in Africa’ (Motto Books, 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 Reimagining the Ephemeral City’ (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). She is working on her fourth, ‘Flipside: The Inadvertent Archive’ (iwalewa books).
Kim’s artistic practice engages disappearances of different kinds and makes restorative gestures, and she collaborates with other artists on curatorial projects including a nomadic platform, guerilla gallery.
Kim holds a PhD (University of Cape Town), BA Fine Art with Distinction in Discourse of Art (UCT), MA in International Journalism (City University of London), and BJourn with Distinction (Rhodes University). She is based at University of the Western Cape as a Research Fellow and is a Research Associate at African Centre for Cities, UCT.
