ARTES MUNDI PRIZE EXHIBITION: NATIONAL MUSEUM OF ART & CHAPTER ARTS CENTRE, CARDIFF, WALES

Informed by the visual traditions of cinema and television, Phil Collins’ diverse practice is based on close engagement with place and community. A comparison to documentary is recurrently made in regard to Collins’ work, which is instructive more in terms of discrepancies rather than analogies. In counterbalance to the documentary’s claim to ‘objectivity’ and ‘truth’, in Collins’ hands the camera itself acquires a form of subjectivity. It acts as an agent both of emancipation and exploitation, desire and betrayal.

Ranging from a disco-dance marathon and a soap-influenced melodrama, to castings, karaoke sessions and press conferences, Collins’ works often provide a platform for the disregarded and the overlooked. Dissecting the political and aesthetic implications of popular visual formats, they indicate that the meaning of a picture-be it still or moving-resides neither in its form nor its subject-matter, but in the transferences it establishes between the producer, the subject and the viewer.