Turner Prize 2006 artists: Phil Collins

Phil Collins’s art investigates our ambivalent relationship with the camera as both an instrument of attraction and manipulation, of revelation and shame. He 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.

For the return of the real / gercegin geri donusu 2005, originally commissioned by the 9th Istanbul Biennial, Collins invited people who felt their lives had been ruined by appearing on talk-shows and makeover shows to tell their extraordinary stories at a press conference. Furthermore, Collins hired a director of a Turkish reality TV show to conduct hour-long interviews with the participants. By putting these individuals under scrutiny once again, Collins makes the ethics of further exploitation one of the main subjects of the piece. 

A new work conceived for the Turner Prize examines the relationship between the production of art and its wider social context by 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.

Visit the shady lane productions site.