The Art of Public Space: Curating and Re-imagining the Ephemeral City [Hardcover]

A journey through Johannesburg via three art projects raises intriguing notions about the constitutive relationship between the city, imagination and the public sphere- through walking, gaming and performance art. Amid prevailing economic validations, the trilogy posits art within an urban commons in which imagination is all-important.1. Re-imagining Johannesburg
2. Curating the Ephemeral City
3. Walking the Footloose City
4. Playing the Cyborg City
5. Performing the Spectral City
6. Art and the Uncertainty Principle
7. Towards an Art of the Commons
8. Living the Everyday City

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)

Kim Gurney is a visual artist, journalist and academic. She is a Research Associate at the University of Cape Town's African Centre for Cities and the University of Johannesburg's Visual Identities in Art & Design Research Centre, South Africa. Her own art generally engages invisibilities or disappearance and attempts restorative gestures, and she runs a nomadic offspace for experimental work.

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 folCM