AVA Archive is a living archive that belongs to the Association for Visual Arts, a non-profit organisation with public benefit status. The physical archive spans the period 1971 – 2021, which is brought online in a phased development, and launched with documents from the 1990s. Online you will find a selection of documents only, perhaps a fifth of all paper files held in more than five hundred folders on the AVA premises.  

Currently in catalogued folders, you may find: 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publications including an in-house arts journal, SA Arts Calendar: Monthly Journal of the SA Association of Arts, superseded by Ventilator, which closed after its inaugural issue, financial records, funding records such as bequests, appeals, grant applications, operational documents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._¹

You are welcome to visit the physical Archive at the Association for Visual Arts’ Lounge+, 35 Church Street, Cape Town. N.B. Perusing the archive is currently by appointment only: admin@ava.co.za or +27-21-424 7436. 

The board and team of the Association for Visual Arts promotes the ongoing curatorship of the AVA Archive as living archive, to produce exhibitions and art projects, research and narratives, analogue and digital, by new generations, who may be “[…] moving beyond the documentarian nature of archive to open up its latent politics and poetics”((Gurney (2023) p. X)).

_{^{1. Source: Dr. Kim Gurney, Flipside: The Inadvertent Archive (forthcoming, iwalewabooks.}}