Phil Collins often operates within forms of low-budget television and reportage-style documentary to address the discrepancy between reality and its representations. In his projects, Collins creates unpredictable situations and his irreverent and intimate engagement with his subjects – a process he describes as ‘a cycle of no redemption’ – is as important for his practice as the final presentation in the gallery.
A new work conceived for the Turner Prize 2006 examines the relationship between the production of art and its wider social context, recognising and utilising the mechanism of the Turner Prize itself as a media spectacle.
Over the course of the exhibition, a fully functioning office, shady lane productions 2006, will research and organise a set of projects exploring the influence that the camera exerts on the behaviour it seeks to record, beginning with a British episode of the return of the real.
