Kerlin Gallery is delighted to announce an exhibition of new work by Phil Collins. Informed by visual traditions of cinema and television, Collins' diverse practice explores lens-based media from a singularly performative and personal perspective.
A comparison to documentary is recurrently made in regard to Collins' work. This connection is instructive more in terms of its discrepancies rather than analogies. In counterbalance to Dziga Vertov's Kino-eye, which posits man as an extension of the scopic machine, 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. Deftly 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.
This will be the artist’s third solo exhibition at Kerlin Gallery, and will comprise of two new works, a video entitled marxism today (prologue), and free fotolab (berlin), a large scale photographic composition.