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6pm-8pm
Free

Please join us at PUBLICS where artist Kathrin Böhm will be joined in person by co editors Gerrie van Noord, Paul O’Neill and Mick Wilson for a public discussion and launch of their new book.

Kathrin Böhm: Art on the Scale of Life has been realised through a collaboration between the University of Gothenburg; PUBLICS, Helsinki; and The Showroom, London, and is co-published with Sternberg Press. The book provides acomprehensive 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 critically profiles, contextualizes, and theoretically elaborates the work of artist Kathrin Böhm, offering an overview of her exceptional practice, which is rooted in a highly original artistic synthesis of a range of concerns and approaches. Since the late 1990s, the artist has expanded the terms of socially engaged ways of working to an unprecedented scale and breadth by producing innovative organizational, spatial, visual, and economic forms, which often entail the production of complex infrastructures.

Offering a significant addition to debates on contemporary art and architecture, social action, and public culture, this artist book-cum-reader-cum-catalogue brings together critical essays across five sections—Exhibiting, Spaces, Economies, Cohabitations, and Compos(i)ting. Alongside Böhm’s own reflections, contributors include Dave Beech, Céline Condorelli, Elvira Dyangani Ose, Wapke Feenstra, Katherine Gibson, Joon-Lynn Goh, Lily Hall, Grace Ndiritu, Doina Petrescu, Gregory Sholette and THEMM!!, Kuba Szreder, and Stephen Wright. Texts and image sections are framed and complemented by texts by co-editors Gerrie van Noord, Paul O’Neill, and Mick Wilson. The book is designed by An Endless Supply.

Kathrin Böhm

Kathrin Böhm is a London-based artist working internationally whose practice
focuses on the collective re-production of public space; economy as public realm;
and the everyday as a starting point for culture. In 2020 Böhm stopped starting
new projects and is currently composting what she has produced as an artist so
far, in order to make fertiliser for long-term infrastructures auch as Company
Drinks and the Rural School of Economics.
Kathrin is the co-founder of Myvillages and The Centre for Plausible Economies,
she is a member of the Community Economies Institute and currently holds an art
professorship at the economy department at Alanus University near Bonn.

Gerrie van Noord
Gerrie van Noord is an editor and educator who is particularly interested in publishing as an environment for the articulation of and critical reflection on creative practices.She has worked on a wide range of publishing projects, including ‘Afterlives’ for Artangel and ‘Fabrications’ for Book Works, has produced several critical anthologies on curating and works for the open-access peer-reviewed PARSE Journal. Recent projects with artists include a selection of Isabel Nolan’s writing and a website on Olivia Plender’s work. Currently she is working towards several publishing projects with Paul O’Neill. Gerrie is a lecturer on the MA Curating Contemporary Art at the Royal College, London, and has a PhD from Birkbeck, University of London.

Paul O’Neill
Dr. Paul O’Neill is an Irish curator, artist, writer and educator. He is the Artistic Director of PUBLICS, a position he took up in September 2017. PUBLICS is a curatorial agency and event space with a dedicated library, and reading room in Helsinki. Between 2013-17, he was Director of the Graduate Program at the Center for Curatorial Studies (CCS), Bard College, New York. He is author of the critically acclaimed book The Culture of Curating and the Curating of Culture(s), (Cambridge, MASS., The MIT Press, 2012), which has been translated into many languages. His most recent coedited book is Not Going it Alone: Collective Curatorial Curating with Apexart, 2023.
Paul has co-curated more than sixty curatorial projects across the world. Paul’s writing has been published in many books, catalogues, journals and magazines. Paul is editor of the curatorial anthology, Curating Subjects (2007), and co-editor of Curating and the Educational Turn (2010), and Curating Research (2014) both with Mick Wilson, and published by de Appel and Open Editions (Amsterdam and London). Paul is author of Locating the Producers: Durational Approaches to Public Art (Amsterdam, Valiz, 2011), co-edited with Claire Doherty and author of the critically acclaimed book The Culture of Curating and the Curating of Culture(s), (Cambridge, MASS., The MIT Press, 2012). Paul is responsible for the agenda-setting series of three recent curatorial anthologies, The Curatorial Conundrum; How Institutions Think, and Curating After the Global: Roadmaps to the Present, co-edited with Lucy Steeds, Mick Wilson et al, and published with the MIT Press, CCS Bard College and Luma Foundation, in 2016, 2017 and 2019 respectively. Paul has recently completed artist’ books with Maryam Jafri, and Dave McKenzie, as well as working on two new books of curatorial texts called CURED, and CURIOUS.

Mick Wilson
Mick Wilson is trained as an artist, and as a historian of art and design–with graduate degrees in history of art and design; information technology and education; and visual culture–Mick Wilson is a research professor at HDK-Valand, University of Gothenburg, appointed on both academic and artistic grounds. Having three decades of experience in higher education, research, development and leadership, he has worked in a wide variety of roles and institutions, including as: Head of Valand Academy, Gothenburg; Dean of the Graduate School of Creative Arts & Media, Ireland; Head of Research, National College of Art & Design, Ireland; Chair of the SHARE network of 40 higher arts education institutions across 30-plus countries; founding editor-in-chief of PARSE Journal; Research Fellow, BAK, basis voor aktuele kunst, Utrecht; Guest Professor at the Art Academy of Latvia (2021-ongoing) and Visiting Professor the School of Visual Arts, New York (2014-ongoing). He has internationally published, edited, lectured and organised conferences in the domain of contemporary art, research, education and curating. He currently lives and works in Gothenburg, Sweden.