Adam Gallagher

Since 2018 Adam has written and produced a series of pamphlets called E.A.R.F (15 in total). These are an index of specific political, aesthetic and biographical (dis)connections which form the basis for his artworks and exhibitions: governments burning confiscated ivory (Le Bourgeois), Lonely Planet guidebooks (Piper Keys) and endothermic Tuna (TG gallery). The E.A.R.F series is held in the Artists Book Library in Stadtgalerie Bern and regularly features at the Artists Self-Publishing Book Fair, London and Miss Read Berlin.

Based on this research, he has made work about fancy-dress, mods, mining memorabilia, radicalisation in young people, and property developers. He has performed in the former Elephant and Castle Shopping Centre as part of a protest against its redevelopment with The Unwelcome Collection, and burnt effigies of the stereotypical and imaginary 'Other’ in a London park, after they had been exhibited. He is invested in the event as a communal space of shared resistance. He regularly collaborates with other artists and often works across cultural disciplines.

In his ongoing radio series with Ruth Angel Edwards, Free Cash: Welfare to (Art)work, he investigates the history of the benefits system in Britain’s art, music and sub-cultural histories and how it has underwritten artistic production. In the series they also reflect on the contestation of space in London, looking at how artists have inhabited the city in alternative ways and how it has fundamentally changed today (from squatting, cooperatives and council housing to gentrification and the loss of artist run spaces).

In 2020, between Britain leaving the EU and the first COVID 19 lockdown, Free Cash did a 19-hour live takeover of Cashmere Radio, Berlin, 40 artists and musicians took part.

Adam also co-ran the artists space a.m. London which focused on film. The regular screening program was active between November 2014 – July 2017 showing 45 films, premiering many for the first time.