real society leire vergara, peio agirre / phil collins (kerlin gallery. dublin)
irudia
Igor, after the first Belgrade Pride. March 2001
The Warrington-born and Belfast-based artist Phil Collins has been invited to participate in the programme of Front Line Compilation: an art encounter between The Basque Country and Northern Ireland in Donostia.
Phil Collins' photo and film work is mainly inscribed in places with a problematic history.
Belfast, Belgrade, Czegrane, on the Kosovan border and Tirana have been some of the backgrounds for his everyday portraits of everyday civilians.
His work constantly searches for an alternative exposure that wants to go further than the already illustrated image created by the media. His photos and films enable us to get that bit closer to subjects portrayed in their natural, social and political context with an added important taint of intimacy, but we can also clearly perceive the act of mediating. Consequently, in the final image, both subject and spectator are implicated in the traditional economy of gazing where one is looked at while one is looking.
Collins usually uses the format of personal interviews to read into the everyday life of his subjects. He wants to know about their dreams, their social life, the places they like, the TV programmes the watch. Recent work by the artist has been developed throughout the transition of the "new" Yugoslavia. In "Becoming more like us", Phil Collins focuses on what the media has stopped reporting and has banished to forgetfullness. This time, Collins observes young Serbs with the intention of reporting how they live their lives. This work, however, also speaks about the constant tendancy of the Media to accomodate the report into the dominant Western narrative. An earlier work, "How to Make a Refugee", filmed in the refugee camps at Stankovec and Czegrane in 1999, also carefully depicts this anger of consuming the portrayed "other" by Western Media. (This film will be shown as part of the "Bideo Proiekzioak" event within Front Line Compilation in Sala Kutxa, Arrasate Street, Donostia, 12-13 April 2002).
Phil Collins has also produced other in Belfast, such as the series "Holiday in Someone Else's Misery". (This was part of of the public art project called "International Language", May 2001). In that display Collins portrayed recent minor incidents that occured in different neighbourhoods all over Belfast. Little has changed despite the Peace Process, yet these incidents only gain coversge in local press. By printing these images onto T-Shirts to be sold, Phil Collins adds an edgy point to the whole thing where the fascination of documenting places "in conflict" becomes as consumable as any other bucolic souvenir image aimed at promoting tourism.
In his work Phil Collins causes the common Media fascination of documenting damage and the personal stories told and lived by the subjects of these "conflict zones" to collide.

You can also see the video "The Marches" in Donostia on the 12th of July.
For more details visit the D.A.E site at: