About AVA Archive
Records roughly spanning five decades are but a short measure in the lifetime of an association that was first rooted in 1850. They form the basis of three interconnected projects; however, each of which in its own way stretches time forward and backward, linking the past to the future. It started in a bathroom.
The history of the AVA reflects much of the social, political and cultural changes that have taken place in South Africa. Until 1995 it was known as the South African Association of Arts, Western Cape. However, the AVA had its origins in the South African Fine Arts Society, the first organised art body in South Africa, founded at a meeting in Cape Town in 1850. The aims of this Society were the formation of a permanent art gallery and art library for exhibiting and promoting art. In 1871 an Act of Parliament changed the SA Fine Arts Society into the SA Fine Arts Association, at the first meeting of which it was resolved to acquire a gallery and a permanent art collection in trust for the residents of the Cape Colony. Its most significant legacy is that this collection, which started with a bequest of 45 pictures by the art patron Sir Thomas Butterworth Bayley, would form the core of the South African National Gallery, now part of Iziko Museums. Not many visitors of the current AVA Gallery know this significant snippet of history.1
a living archive
When an analogue collection of uncatalogued and unexamined files was found stacked in an unused bathroom in an area of the AVA’s premises aptly registered in a larger building complex as Common Property, it ignited a solid stream of activity. The AVA Archive as Living Archive, a book project titled Flipside: The Inadvertent Archive (forthcoming with iwalewabooks), and the online portal that you are visiting, are the 2023 harvest.
An AVA Archive ad hoc committee, composed in 2019 to imagine and draft a policy for the roughly 560 folders found with miscellaneous documents2, opted to handle the stacks as ‘Living Archive’. The members realised that at least as much material as the upstairs cabinets were holding, must exist in files and drawers of artists who exhibited their works on and within the walls of the AVA premises, and with former board members and gallery staff. Not to mention the narratives archived in their minds! This is why the AVA Archive has been designed for ongoing growth, to start with via the “Contribute to the Archive” form on this portal.
Most archival documents on site at the AVA relate to exhibitions hosted at the AVA Gallery – formerly known as the Metropolitan Life Gallery, after a long-term sponsor. At the time of the launch of the digital AVA Archive, the website contains selected material documenting activity in the 1990s specifically. In a phased development, you will soon be able to browse back to 1971, the year in which the AVA moved into its current premises, as well as into the present.
You are welcome to visit the physical Archive at the AVA’s Lounge+, too. Perusing the archive is currently by appointment only. In addition, the AVA has programmed a string of Conscious Curating Co-productions, exhibitions proposed by independent curators, which activate the archive in one way or another, visually.
A book of creative non-fiction titled Flipside: The Inadvertent Archive, which is independently researched and written by Dr. Kim Gurney (Centre for Humanities Research, UWC), is the first significant text to emerge from engagement with the physical records of the AVA Archive. As Gurney writes: “Being immersed in [the Archive] affords a different perspective – an expansive sense of slow time, where past, present and future converge, and other qualities that being delightfully ‘out of time’ affords”.3
The storyline in Flipside journeys from room to room in the architectural plans of the original house that AVA calls home (Huis Richter); each chapter is themed for a specific topic. The kitchen, for instance, is about working principles, the lounge discusses art and politics while the rooftop reflects upon outward-looking connections into artworld ecologies. Each one follows what Gurney dubs ‘inadvertent archive’ – unexpected or fugitive artefacts that startle, diverge, or take their reader by surprise; she follows their trails to see where they might lead. Together they surface the invisible labour and notions of care involved in AVA’s double act of exhibition making (as a gallery) and institution building (as an association), along with other lacunae. Bridging a temporal arc from apartheid to post-apartheid, the stories also offer a compelling back-room lens on larger sociopolitical shifts and nuances. Voices from the archive itself interrupt the author’s narrative to weave a literary bricolage that ultimately rejects structural discontinuities and shows how interlinked things truly are. Flipside: The Inadvertent Archive, over four years in the making and Gurney’s fourth book, is edited by Karen Press (editor, poet and writer) & iwalewabooks (Dr. Katharina Fink and Dr. Nadine Siegert), with an introduction from Mirjam Asmal (former AVA Director). It is supported by various institutional partners.
Between Gurney reading unindexed papers in an unused attic bathroom and you browsing the search engine of a 21st-century, innovative website, new stories will be added to the AVA Living Archive. Because what gives the AVA, and its Archive, its power is “common space […] which belongs to nobody and to everybody”.4
Artists have ownership of exhibitions in this space, and as such, of their archiving too.
The strength of the AVA and its Archive’s heartbeat confounds.
1. A quick overview into the history of the AVA is available here or, in detail, in Flipside: The Inadvertent Archive, authored by Dr. Kim Gurney (forthcoming in 2023 with iwalewabooks). A digital timeline of the AVA’s genealogy is available here, compiled as a companion to Flipside. Earlier records of the SAAA’s activity are lodged at the National Library of South Africa: ‘The Records of the Cape Branch of the South African Association of Arts (1946–1972)’.
2. Exhibition information including proposals, Selection Committee decisions, artist statements, exhibition statements, draft and final invitations, press releases, price lists, purchase agreements, draft and final opening speeches, catalogues, occasional working sketches or art works, slides or photographs, correspondence, marketing material, reviews, newspaper clippings, curricula vitae or biographies, material relating to external exhibitions such as (international) biennales and festivals, institutional information including minutes of AGMs and committee meetings, policy documents and documents relating to larger art sector engagement such as conferences, sector meetings, competitions, etc., correspondence with artists, members, visitors, art dealers, collectors, the media, art handlers, visitor books containing handwritten audience comments, publications including an in-house arts journal, SA Arts Calendar: Monthly Journal of the SA Association of Arts, superseded by Ventilator, which closed after its inaugural issue, financial records, funding records such as bequests, appeals, grant applications, operational documents with regards to human resources, property management, insurance, equipment and capital, membership information, architectural plans and miscellaneous reference items such as videos, catalogues, books, media clippings. Source: Flipside.
3. Flipside: The Inadvertent Archive (forthcoming, iwalewabooks).
4. Gurney (2015). The Art of Public Space: Curating and Re-imagining the Ephemeral City. London: Palgrave Macmillan, p.149.
Credits
AVA Archives committee 2019 – 2022
Mirjam Asmal, Heeten Bhagat, Leonie Chima Emeka, Renée Holleman, Phokeng Setai, Jane Taylor, Cheryl Traub-Adler and Sam Wroth Rietmann.
AVA Archives committee 2023 onwards
Phokeng Setai, Keely Shinners, Olga Speakes.
Archivists
Sam Wroth Rietmann and Phokeng Setai. Intern: Michael Jacobs.
Dr Kim Gurney for igniting the AVA Archive with Flipside: The Inadvertent Archive.
Website developing team
Aryan Kaganof, Jurgen Meekel, Martijn Pantlin, Andrea Rolfes.
Donors and partners
National Heritage Council, National Lotteries Commission, A4 Arts Foundation, Strauss & Co, BASA and the Scheryn Collection.
AVA Archive belongs to the Association for Visual Arts, a non-profit and public benefit organisation. Its archive is subject to the Protection of Personal Information Act (POPIA, No. 4 of 2013), which protects personal information by law (Section 26). Exempted from these provisions are research purposes that serve a public interest, as well as information deliberately made public by the data subject.
The AVA is generously supported by its Donors and Sponsors
