Phil Collins

Phil Collins (b. 1970, Runcorn, England) is a British visual and media artist whose wide-ranging practice encompasses video, photography, installation, performance, and participatory art. Since the late 1990s, his work has critically examined culture, mass media, and everyday life. Collins lives and works in Berlin and Cologne and is Professor of Video Art at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne. Collins studied Drama and English Literature at the University of Manchester, graduating with two BA degrees in 1994. He later completed an MA in Fine Art at the University of Ulster in Belfast in 1999. During the second half of the 1990s, he was a member of Max Factory, a London-based performance group. He also held a range of jobs—from working as a nightclub cloakroom attendant to teaching performance and film theory—that contributed to his nuanced understanding of culture, labor, and representation. Collins’s practice is characterized by a sustained engagement with lived experience and specific social contexts. He frequently collaborates with non-professional participants, including young Palestinians taking part in a dance marathon, fans of the Smiths in Bogotá, Istanbul, and Indonesia, young people in Baghdad, members of an anti-fascist skinhead community in Malaysia, and guests at a homeless shelter in Cologne. Through these encounters, he develops projects that examine identity, desire, belonging, and the relationship between individuals and systems of representation in a globalized, media-saturated world. Collins has created ambitious video installations that investigate popular media, global cultures, and political realities. His they shoot horses (2004) is a two-screen, seven-hour video installation documenting two groups of young Palestinians participating in a disco dance marathon in Ramallah. Another landmark work, the world won’t listen (2004–2007), is a three-part video installation featuring fans in Bogotá, Istanbul, Jakarta, and Bandung performing karaoke versions of songs from the Smiths’ 1987 compilation album of the same name. my heart’s in my hand, and my hand is pierced, and my hand’s in the bag, and and the bag is shut, and my heart is caught (2013) was developed in collaboration with guests at GULLIVER, a homeless support center in Cologne, and a group of international musicians. Recorded telephone calls made by the participants became the basis for original songs presented through vinyl records and listening boot]}} Collins’s work has been presented at numerous international institutions, including the Museum of Modern Art and MoMA PS1, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; the New Museum, New York; Beirut Art Center; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo; the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston; the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam; the Hayward Gallery, London; and mumok—Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien. Across his projects, Collins consistently explores how culture, media, and personal experience shape the collective imagination. His work occupies the intersections of documentary, performance, and socially engaged practice, while critically examining the relationships between the camera, its subjects, and its audiences.