Kathrin Böhm is a London based artist who considers herself local in Hackney, London, UK and Höfen, Germany.
Her work takes place in and outside the art world, as she engages with governance, economics and different trans-local communities. Her main interests are the collective (re-)production of public space, trade as public realm and the everyday as a starting point for culture.
Böhm is a founding member of the international artist group Myvillages (Myv), the artist initiative Keep it Complex – Make it Clear (KIC), art and architecture collective Public Works (pw), and the Centre for Plausible Economies (CPE). She set up the Haystacks series in 2013 and arts enterprise Company Drinks in 2014.
She has expanded the terms of socially engaged practice through a wide range of co-produced complex organisational, spatial, visual and economic forms, which often start with familiar everyday formats, such as a school, a shop, wallpaper or a drink. She regularly teaches and publishes, and contributes as a researcher to the wider topics of New Economy, Usership of Art and the Production of Public Space.
In 2014 Peckham Platform commissioned Böhm to work with service users of Three Cs, a Peckham-based organisation for people with learning disabilities, autism and/or mental health challenges. Money Distribution Machine and Other Useful Contraptions invited audiences to explore a range of desired appliances for life that came out of conversations and workshops between the artist and Three Cs users. The exhibition was part of Anxiety 2014, a London-wide arts festival curated by the Mental Health Foundation.
The centrepiece of the exhibition was the Apparatus, a multifunctional device producing a range of goods including facilitating coin pressing, voucher printing, plate spinning, chocolate pressing and seed bomb making.
Böhm’s work was also part of the 2016 Peckham Platform Retrospective exhibition, a timeline of all 20 artists commissions realised by Peckham Platform between 2010 – 2016.
In 2020 Böhm stopped creating new projects and is currently composting what she has produced as an artist so far, in order to make fertiliser for evolving long term infrastructures such as the Rural School of Economics with Myvillages, Company Drinks and The Centre for Plausible Economies.
