Kathrin Böhm: Art on the Scale of Life

Kathrin Böhm: Art on the Scale of Life is a publication edited by Gerrie van Noord, Paul O'Neill and Mick Wilson, and realised through a collaboration between The Showroom, PUBLICS, Helsinki and the University of Gothenburg. Co-published with Sternberg Press, the book provides a comprehensive overview of Kathrin Böhm’s multifaceted, deeply collaborative and durational practice. Combining visual and textual material, it offers an overview of Böhm's exceptional modus operandi.

Kathrin Böhm: Art on the Scale of Life brings together critical dialogue and reflection by internationally acclaimed contributors including: Dave Beech, Céline Condorelli, Elvira Dyangani Ose, Wapke Feenstra, Katherine Gibson, Joon-Lynn Goh, Lily Hall, Yolande Zola Zoli van der Heide, Grace Ndiritu, Gerrie van Noord, Paul O’Neill, Doina Petrescu, Gregory Sholette and THEMM!!, Kuba Szreder, Gavin Wade, Mick Wilson, Stephen Wright, and Franciska Zólyom.

Since the mid 1990s Böhm has expanded the terms of socially engaged ways of working to an unprecedented scale and breadth by co-producing complex spatial, visual and economic forms. These often entail the production and ongoing re-production of organisational infrastructures, manifested in collective identities such as Myvillages (since 2003) and Public Works (active 1999–2012), or via projects such as The Centre for Plausible Economies (since 2018), Company: Movements, Deals and Drinks (since 2014) and the Rural School of Economics (since 2010 the Eco Nomadic School).

Photographic, diagrammatic and typographic imagery run through the book, demonstrating the confident, joyful visual and spatial languages embedded in Böhm's work. The visual register of the book is therefore much more than a series of illustrations and acts as a counterpoint to and extension of the ideas elaborated in the texts. The book is designed by the innovative design studio An Endless Supply, who have been collaborating with Böhm across various projects since Trade Show at Eastside Projects, Birmingham, in 2013.

The book follows in the wake of a major collaborative exhibition that explored over twenty years of Kathrin Böhm's practice across two phases at The Showroom in 2021, COMPOST. Kathrin Böhm: Turning the Heap and COMPOST: For Future Use. These enabled a public process of sieving through, assessing, archiving and reformulating Böhm’s practice by making use of her methods of production – working one-to-one, collaboratively and in public – to distil tactics, tools, concepts and strategies that continue to serve a socially transformative art practice. Art on the Scale of Life emerges as a key outcome of this process and offers a significant addition to debates on contemporary art and architecture, social action and public culture.