The Meaning of Style

Delete Beach is a futuristic tale set in the near future, in which a schoolgirl joins an anti-capitalist resistance group in a society in which carbon-based energy is illegal. Made in collaboration with Studio 4°C, one of Japan’s leading animation studios.

Bring Down The Walls looks at the US prison industrial complex through the lens of house music and nightlife. The connection comes from the years in which Phil Collins worked with men incarcerated at Sing Sing, a maximum-security prison in upstate New York.

Following the artist Phil Collins' search for a decommissioned statue of German philosopher Friedrich Engels in eastern Ukraine, and documenting its journey and arrival to a homecoming party in Manchester.

Commissioned by The Common Guild as part of the Commonwealth 2014 celebrations, Phil Collins's film is both a modern day city symphony and a love letter to Glasgow. Through musical numbers, animation and a uniquely Glaswegian cable TV station, the film conjures up a distinctive vision of a city. Collins met people in maternity hospitals, schools, community groups and social clubs for the elderly, asking them to sing songs, make predictions for the future, debate the status of freedom in today’s society, guide us through the city’s most famous prison and dance like there’s no tomorrow. With animation by Matthew Robins, stellar songs from Welsh singer-songwriter Cate Le Bon, soundtrack contributions from Mogwai’s Barry Burns, local voodoo ravers Golden Teacher and the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, Tomorrow Is Always Too Long will take you on a trip deep into the heart of the city and beyond.

Glasgow-based artist Phil Collins’s film Soy Mi Madre examines the immigrant populations of Colorado’s Roaring Fork Valley, a sizable percentage of which hail from northwestern Mexico. The region relies heavily on service and maintenance work provided largely through this population, who often commute to work in Aspen. Loosely inspired by Jean Genet’s The Maids—a seminal example of Theatre of the Absurd that renders surreal the intricate power dynamics that exist between people of divergent socioeconomic groups and exploits the volatility of social identity—Soy Mi Madre portrays the social realities of this region through the melodramatic lens of the telenovela. Reproduced in this volume through a generous selection of stills, the film uses popular Mexican television actors and crew, including Patricia Reyes Spindola, Zaide Silvia Guitérrez, Veronica Langer, and Salvador Parra, as well as members of the transsexual prostitute community of Mexico City.

British artist Phil Collins has made work in conflicted geopolitical sites around the world, including Baghdad, Belfast, Bogotá, and Ramallah, creating nuanced representations of people and places. In a departure from many documentaries and site-specific practice, Collins engages politics and pop culture in tandem, often soliciting the participation of the communities in which he works. His video installation Dünya Dinlemiyor (Turkish for "the world won't listen") features young people in Istanbul performing karaoke versions of songs by the 1980s band The Smiths. Within the politically fraught context of Istanbul, The Smiths' melancholic pop takes on new poignancy, asking us to listen to what the rest of the world won't. Collins was a nominee for the 2006 Turner Prize.

Crab Day is a short film made to accompany Cate Le Bon’s eponymous album, released on April 15, 2016 via Turnstile. Directed by Phil Collins and shot on location in Berlin in the winter of 2015.

Shining a light on what is generally perceived as the losing side in the political and social upheavals of the past two decades, marxism today is an ongoing project that began by following the fortunes of Marxist-Leninist teachers in the former Communist East Germany. Collins’ short film marxism today (prologue) (2010) mixes contemporary interviews with the ex-teachers alongside archive material, to form the centrepiece of this exhibition, which also includes a new video in which a number of concepts central to Marxist economic analysis are introduced to a new generation of students. Relocating from the start of this school year to Manchester, where Engels wrote The Condition of the Working Class in England, Collins’ project prompts a wider reflection on the city’s formative place in the history of radical thinking. Initiating a series of interactions with nearby schools and the local public, it also enquires into the continuing relevance of Marxist ideas in the present day.