Selected solo work (2015 - 2025)

‘The Ballards and Damp and Buttery’( 2024)
Video, 02:30
Vocal performance, Ben Spatz

‘The Ballards and Damp and Buttery’ (02:30, 2024) folds three small sections of ‘Victory Monument to the Vanquishing of the Artists by the Engineers’ (included in ‘Wait With Your Friends and Do Your Best to Stay There’) into some of the material that shaped it, namely, sub broadcast recordings of lectures and discussions produced by the engineering departments of significant organisations and institutions. Built of text, wildly unstable and utterly unbuildable in any traditional sense, ‘Victory Monument to the Vanquishing of the Artists by the Engineers’ prematurely announces and undermines the win.

Online screening for JOAN Publishing

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‘Victory Monument to the Vanquishing of the Artists by the Engineers’ (2024)

Text version
Format: PaperbackISBN 978-1-7392596-9-3

Built of text, wildly unstable and utterly unbuildable in any traditional sense, the ‘Victory Monument to the Vanquishing of the Artists by the Engineers’ prematurely announces a win.

-JOAN Publishing

‘Victory Monument to the Vanquishing of the Artists by the Engineers’ (2023)
Radio version
Duration: 21:28

Commissioned by @ooo_radio Street and exhibition broadcast-Forumbox Gallery, Helsinki, Finland. 10 - 12/11/23
Broadcast by Radiophrenia, april 2025

‘One, 2, 3’ (2021)
Format: Paperback
ISBN 978-1-9993276-2-0

JOAN Publishing

Exploiting forms that traditionally get burnt up in the production of the moving image, Jenna Collins' One, 2, 3 moves through sequences of writing that dramatize the small but necessary acts of theft and invention that shape a story in its telling. In this case, one that navigates the legacy of a dead female writer and the task of being a living artist.

Kate Feld:

One, 2, 3 is a splendid feast made from the broken bits at the bottom of the bag. Bitingly funny, with a peculiar slippy charm that lodges its subversive truths about making art deep in the bones.

Paul Becker:

In Jenna Collins’ One, 2, 3 an inexplicable locating occurs. We are led into rooms, views, situations and scenarios with no real notion of how we came to be wherever we are but at the same time finding ourselves as the unwitting witness to certain meticulousnesses, certain claustrophobic, often absurd, unbalancings, events, processes. The possibility appears to be offered of dipping one’s fingers into the pockets of the text and running off like a thief and indeed the placing of incidences, sometimes faintly mirroring, sometimes set inside - or resting obliquely against - the other, does leave the reader free from consecutive narrative but at the same time, oddly trapped even implicated in what unfolds and what doesn’t.

Internal Dissolve (2020)
Video 05:21

‘Internal Dissolve’ is imagined as a tourist video of sorts. The assembled material constitutes a hot crowd containing an extract from a Pier Paolo Pasolini screenplay, tourist footage (frequently the artist’s own) and footage from people testing camera functions only to get distracted by details of the world made special by the viewfinder. The tourist is adept at being a bit bored and then engrossed by some thing or other, a speculating presence engaged in, or thinking about, the possibility and cost of further escapes.

-Commissioned by the Stanley Picker Public Lectures and Events series at Kingston School of Art

Only Three Actors (2020)
Contribtion to collective novel

The Kink in the Arc is a collective, dream novel. Invited writers, artists and curators contribute a description of an artwork in any form, these descriptions are then ‘sited’ within the context of the novel: an overheard conversation between two residents in a ‘sanatorium for the weary of image’.
- Paul Becker

-The Kink in the Arc, Paul Becker

We Are the Road (2018)
Video, 10:15 (01:55 extract of 10:15)

In 1987, Stewart Brand wrote an evangelical account of the MIT Media Lab in which he asserted, ‘If you are not part of the steamroller, you are part of the road’. In this brutal formulation, the producers of technologies are active and the consumers, passive.

'We Are the Road' considers the position of the viewer and occupies the space of ‘the road’. It takes the activity of the viewer at the moment of viewing seriously, seeking to voice, thicken, complicate and formally double the encounter, refuting the notion that anything about this activity is passive.

- London Film Festival BFI, London (2018)
- Videographic Entanglements conference, University of Huddersfield (2023)
- Screening and commissioned text, Authoring Agents by Donald Butler, LUX Scotland (2019)
- Casa Victor Hugo, Havana, Cuba. October (2017)
- Gotland Art Museum, Visby, Sweden (2017)

Internal Dissolve (2018)
Newsprint publication
60 cm x 30cm

Newsprint publication that proposes making writing under the influence of the moving image by expanding upon an extract from Pier Paolo Pasolini’s screenplay, St Paul (1977), which did not secure funding to become a film.

‘What would it be to dissolve internally, or to fade? Like a night of serious drinking I imagine, but I know this is Marseille and a population of fictional sailors -unpaid extras sharing cigarettes -are pressing in.’

- Dublin Art Book Fair at Temple Bar Gallery, Dublin, Ireland (2018)
- Aquired by The National Irish Visual Arts Library as part of the Broken Diorama collection (2018)

The Grand Alliance (2016)

The Grand Alliance is named after the consortium of American companies brought together in 1993 for the purpose of developing an HDTV standard, a process as personal, political and commercial, as it was technological or aesthetic. The project responds to the libidinal, comedic and delusional impulses present in the archival material, thinking about what we attach to the promise of ever better images and how we imagine the process by which they are arrived at.

Throughout April, Jenna Collins undertook a residency within the online and physical space of Quick Millions, producing an unreliable history of HDTV in the form of a screenplay and associated material.

-Exhibited, Quick Millions, London (2016)

Someone Who Isn’t Me (2015)
Video, 09:20

‘Narratives mined from online drug user support forums, where codified anonymising practices create an uncanny duality of simultaneous intimacy and disavowal.'

-Benjamin Cook, LUX

- London Film Festival, Experimenta strand, (2015)
- Art Bermondsey Project Space, London (2016)
- Akbank Short Film Festival, Istanbul, Turkey (2016)
- Intimate Space, St Petersburg, Russia (2016)
- Transart Institute Research, Berlin, Germany (2017)

Polygraph (2015)
‘This workspace, pieces of equipment, cables, and the production of a wave image on screen strikes me, as I am occupied with making the music, as reminiscent of the set-up of a polygraph examination. It was also reminiscent of the scenario of the captain’s deck on a ship. I am the captain, my tools around me –my monitors and my controls. I am imagining workspaces, and further workspaces come to mind, those in School Is a Factory, 1978-80 by Allan Sekula, particularly the image of the computer programmer whom Sekula describes in the text element of the artwork as 'solemn'. He looks at the camera flatly as he stands sandwiched behind a shelf of huge, open binders and in front of wardrobe-sized computing machines. ‘

- BBC Radio 3 Late Junction, guest hosted by Hannah Catherine Jones (2018)
- Radiophrenia Highlights for Radio Space Borealis in Bergen, Norway (2018)
- Radiophrenia, CCA, Glasgow (2017)
- Radio Quantica, Lisbon, Portugal (2017)

JennaCollins