EMAF 2024: Artist in focus – Phil Collins

EMAF presents Phil Collins as this year’s Artist in Focus. Collins is internationally acclaimed for a socially engaged practice that addresses the intersections of art, politics and popular culture. Taking different forms – from films, photography and installations, to performative situations and live events – his work foregrounds aspects of lived experience and voices that have often been disregarded or suppressed.

In a newly commissioned essay Dominic Paterson asserts that Collins “uses his own strategic reproduction of normative media frames as the occasion to trouble (or queer) them. His work acknowledges the force of such frames through its reiterating of their strongly determining effects—a feature that is always itself performative in the work; always a matter of conspicuous gestures, demonstrations, enacted poses, and repetitions. The task Collins’ work has taken on in recent years, however, is not just to critique or subvert existing framings, but rather to collectively create conditions in which communities can shape, for themselves, the spaces in which they appear and perform as themselves.”

Among other works spanning more than twenty years, the films on show include 'Bring Down the Walls' (2020), an argument for the abolition of the American prison-industrial complex and a celebration of the dance floor as a site of transcendence and liberation; his documentary musical 'Tomorrow Is Always Too Long' (2014), a modern day city symphony and a love letter to Glasgow; as well as 'marxism today (prologue)' (2010), which shines a light on the political and social upheavals since the fall of the Berlin Wall through the personal stories of three former teachers of Marxism-Leninism and an Olympic gymnast from the GDR.