This Autumn we are very proud to present the first ever public exhibition of Adam Bohman's visual work at the Cafe OTO Project Space - the result of an extensive crowd-funding campaign we carried out earlier this year.

Adam Bohman has been operating on the outer fringes of underground music for decades. However, his tape cut-ups and home-built instruments represent just a tiny fraction of his artistic practice. In parallel, Adam has been creating and carefully stockpiling an extraordinary collection of collages, ink drawings and graphic scores that only a handful of people have ever seen.

The planning, installation and delivery of this exhibition has been entirely funded by donations from the public, with donors receiving personalised postcards or limited edition prints in return.

"Visiting Adam and seeing this work has been one of the most exciting things I have been involved in since starting Cafe OTO. Only a tiny aspect of Adam's creative output has been seen publicly and this show is a small but important step towards redressing that." - Hamish Dunbar

ADAM BOHMAN

Adam Bohman has been exploring the sonic possibilities of the amplified detritus of everyday life since his first forays into the strange world of hometaping while growing up in the Ballardian badlands of west London. Since then he’s become an essential part of London’s musical underground, curating concerts and performing with a wide variety of ensembles, including the legendary Morphogenesis, the London Improvisers Orchestra, to which he also contributes his own distinctive graphic scores, and smaller groups with players such as Dylan Nyoukis and Steve Beresford. Far less documented is Adam’s visual art - an extraordinary collection of collages, ink drawings and graphic scores spanning decades that only a handful of people have seen before.

'Parrots, Drawings And Cheap Glue'

“As a free improviser Adam Bohman has pretty much everything required for the job. He weilds an armoury of soundmaking devices – a disassembled violin, springs, lightbulbs, a barbecue grill, a wire record rack, a wooden box with wires stretched across – and creates a post-serial slipstream of variegated events, where more detail is pressed into a split second than ought to be allowed.” - The WIRE

The Bohman aesthetic can be a dense and tangled thing to unpick and describe. Various and nefarious sounds and artistic influences merge and collide, Varèsian sound montage supporting spoken word material sourced from a pub menu, or frenetic juxtapositions between amplified shoe brushes and a frenzied tape cut-up of 17th Century instruments. Sound art which oscillates between states of the absurd and sonically grotesque, and highly articulate explorations of extra-musical sound.

EDITIONS

We've made editions of three of Adam's 'diary tapes' from 2009, 2010 and 2014. These will be available on cassette from the project space and are priced at £5 each.

There are also high quality giclee print reproductions of the following works available to purchase on site or online:

'Parrots, Drawings and Cheap Glue' (A1)
'Children, Trains and Teeth' (A3)

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OTO PROJECT SPACE

The OTO Project Space is located just around the corner from Cafe OTO at 1-7 Ashwin Street - E8 3DL.

It was created as a space for artists to develop new work and for OTO Projects to present workshops, talks, film screenings and installations relating to the core programme at Cafe OTO. The building was designed by Assemble - a young, critically acclaimed design practice based in London - and built by a team of more than 30 volunteers.