Phil Collins
Sat. 20 Jun. – Sat. 22 Aug. 2026

The Model is delighted to present a major exhibition by the internationally renowned visual artist and filmmaker Phil Collins. Over the course of a deeply engaged practice spanning three decades, Collins has realised ambitious projects that shift perspective between the individual and the collective, situating personal experience within broader historical contexts. Balancing intimacy with social critique, he consistently challenges the conventions of documentary representation, creating works that are emotionally charged, formally adventurous and attentive to the poetics of the everyday. This presentation brings together three recent moving-image installations which, in distinct registers, reflect on the afterlives of socialism and the ways public space, ideology and collective form shape one another.

A century after the October Revolution, Ceremony (2018) follows the journey of a Soviet-era statue of Friedrich Engels – co-founder, with Karl Marx, of communist theory – from a village in Eastern Ukraine to Manchester, the city where Engels lived and worked for more than twenty years. There, it was unveiled as a new public monument and welcomed by local communities during a live broadcast closing the 2017 edition of Manchester International Festival. In the year leading up to this moment, Collins collaborated with activists, organisations and people across the city to explore the social conditions of austerity Britain in the twenty-first century.

Featuring Maxine Peake as the voice of Engels, alongside a central performance by Carla Henry, Ceremony is a freewheeling journey through Collins’ expansive visual language: from documentary and artist’s film to staged performance and archival material. As the statue travels from one end of Europe to the other, the film traverses shifting historical and political imaginaries, while repeatedly cutting back to the lives of Collins’ collaborators in Manchester – a young dancer struggling to make ends meet, a factory worker returning to work immediately after a stroke, a schoolgirl facing limited opportunities for further education, a homeless woman losing custody of her child, and a migrant navigating the bureaucracy of the welfare system.

Combining elements of the road movie, experimental television, and socialist mass gatherings, Ceremony prompts broader questions, such as what might Engels make of the world today, and where do continuities with the struggles of his time remain visible?

Home to You (2019) was filmed in the neighbourhood of Luník IX in Košice, Slovakia, in collaboration with the city’s sizeable Roma population, among the largest in the region. Once a showpiece of socialist urban planning, the housing estate underwent major demographic change after 1989, as many impoverished and socially marginalised families were gradually displaced there from other parts of the city. Marked by decades of neglect and segregation, Luník IX is emblematic of ongoing exclusion that defines the everyday realities of Roma people across Eastern Europe.

Collins’ film follows a number of residents from the estate as they move through the routines and pressures of daily life – working low-paid jobs, caring for relatives, coping with overstretched public services and crumbling infrastructure, as well as sharing moments of companionship and fleeting joy. Instead of reproducing the imagery through which Roma are often reduced or maligned, they appear here as grafters, caregivers, neighbours, and pillars of community. Originally created as a companion piece to Cate Le Bon’s eponymous single, the film remains attuned to gestures of solidarity, gentle humour and mutual dependence, whilst insisting on the urgency of confronting the structures that deny recognition, dignity and belonging to certain lives. What emerges is less a portrait of marginalisation than a quiet affirmation of presence and collective endurance.

In a succession of receding visual planes, An Interval (2018/2026) takes the form of a single-take static view of a busy thoroughfare in Pyongyang, filmed in 2018. Pedestrians, cars and trams move simultaneously in opposite directions, like overlapping currents within a city in motion. The fixed, unblinking gaze of the camera lends poetry to the intervals that structure this flow, to the loose choreography between bodies, gestures and movements, at once spontaneous and coordinated, through which social life is made visible.

A glitch in the DV tape abruptly ruptures this mesmerising rhythm. For a brief moment, a body crossing the frame appears split in two, before the image gives way to footage from the Arirang Mass Games, a large-scale spectacle filmed the same year, during one of the last periods in which foreign visitors were granted access. The interval between bodies that structures the street scene, is suddenly replaced by another form of choreography, one organised through synchronisation, discipline and display. Embodying the ideology of the nation, the games are an immense exercise in mass performance as political theatre: hundreds of thousands of participants in precise formations, elaborate staging and visual effects. It is the state presenting itself as image – not everyday life, but it’s mythologised, fictional double.

North Korea is frequently imagined in contradictory terms – as both inaccessible and hyper-visible, hidden from view yet endlessly reproduced by state propaganda. An Interval inhabits the tension between these modes of seeing. Rather than seeking revelation or explanation, it stays close to everyday activity and the social patterns that emerge in repetition.

The exhibition is accompanied by a screening of Collin’s 2004 film, they shoot horses on Sat. 4 Jul. from 3.30pm. Referencing the 1935 novel They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, which tells the story of gruelling dance competitions as a form of entertainment during the Great Depression, they shoot horses was a disco dance marathon organised by the artist Phil Collins in 2004 with a group of young people in Ramallah, Palestine, during the Second Intifada.

Filmed in real time over the course of eight hours, the dancers pass through unfolding stages of elation, joy, fatigue, exhaustion, and endurance to a soundtrack of pop, rock and dance hits from the 1960s onwards. Speaking to both the hardships and the resilience of living under the decades-long illegal occupation by the state of Israel, they shoot horses centres dancing as an act of resistance in the face of daily atrocities, and as a fragile yet inextinguishable anticipation of liberation to come.

they shoot horses is accompanied by a programme of events that runs from 3.30pm on 4 July at The Model. As part of this Phil Collins will be in conversation with Dr Declan Long at 4pm.