How to Make a Refugee, 1999, video
Simple Instrument, 1999,

video The works of Phil Collins address conflict situations, the camera and the media, promote fallibility, awkwardness and low fidelity as methods of discussing, with questionable authority, ideas which have a pressing emotional and political significance for an audience. How To Make A Refugee is a set of works filmed in Skopje, Macedonia, and the refugee camps at Stenkovec and Chegrane, during the conflict of May 1999. Simple Instrument was filmed in Belgrade during Christmas 1999. Both pieces, and the accompanying prints, consider the camera and artist as ambivalent and complicit critics in the organisation of images for political and aesthetic consumption. The work in many ways eschews the smugness and bravado of reportage; it reveals, in some ways, not differences but similarities, an ease and responsiveness from the subjects rather than danger or difficulty, and the shame and embarrassment of eliciting pictures which the press and visual media continually reproduce. It is here that we, the viewers, may find ourselves implicated in the messiness and the complex emotional responses of the subjects - as collusive witnesses to the action we consume, and also, in a more general sense, in the tacit shame of our roles as ineffectual political bystanders.