El Mundo No Escuchará (2005)
By Phil Collins
In his installation at Lora Reynolds Gallery, British-born, Belfast-based artist Phil Collins continues a practice of immersing himself, culturally speaking, in regions engaged in political turmoil. Whether his city of choice is Baghdad, where in 2002 the artist invited aspiring local actors to sit for screen tests (Baghdad Screen Test), or Ramallah, where Collins documented the city’s youth partaking in a sixteen-hour disco dance-a-thon (They Shoot Horses), the artist bypasses associations propagated through mass media images of certain places, offering poignant glances into the personal lives of their inhabitants. For the project presented at Lora Reynolds Gallery, El mundo no escucha/The world won’t listen, Collins took up temporary residence in Bogotá, Colombia. Borrowing his piece’s title from the seminal British cult band The Smiths’ 1987 album, Collins’ project began with an invitation. The artist wheatpasted large, silk-screened posters throughout the city of Bogotá, inviting “the shy, the dissatisfied, the narcissistic, the shower superstars and anyone who wants to be someone else for a night” to perform Karaoke de los Smiths. These same posters now paper a wall of the…
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