JENNA COLLINS

Selected projects and information

The King of the Stool Pigeons (2025)

The King of the Stool Pigeons (2025)
Video 6:10

SWEDENBORG FILM FESTIVAL 2025 - selected and shortlisted for the prize screening (reversioned)

Judges are writer and filmmaker CHRIS PETIT and Swedenborg Society’s President, the writer and chronicler of London, IAIN SINCLAIR

www.swedenborg.org.uk/events/filmfestival2025/

The King of the Stool Pigeons (2025)
Video 7: 48

Commissioned: FluxusMuseum Prize for Experimental Video 2025
Exhibited: June - September 2025, Paros, Greece

Supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England, DYCP

Completed work shortlisted for the final prize.

‘The King of the Stool Pigeons' invites viewers to comment on the building of an absurd monument to scientific and technological progress. Built from short clips produced by institutions, organisations, and companies in the latter half of the 20th century, the construction is narrated by an unidentified expert and loosely based on the text accompanying Albrecht Dürer’s controversial 1525 design for a ‘Monument to the Vanquished Peasants.’ References from science and engineering are conflated with those from the arts in a hyperactive, fictional reformulation that assembles a confident yet ridiculous stack of figures, objects, and scenarios. ‘The King of the Stool Pigeons’ draws out the human impulses behind progress presented as fact, seeks out the affective precedents of developments such as A.I., and questions the hierarchies of power and influence that shape where we go next.

precursor:

The Ballards and Damp and Buttery (2024)

Video 02:30

Screened: JOAN publishing
Vocal Performance: Ben Spatz

‘The Ballards and Damp and Buttery’ 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..

Victory Monument to the Vanquishing of the Artists by the Engineers (2023/24)

Radio version: comissioned OOO Radio, Finland
Radio broadcast: Radiophrenia, Glasgow
Radio broadcast: Resonance FM (for Radiophrenia)
Text version: JOAN Publishing
Performance: Kingsotn School of Art

‘Victory Monument to the Vanquishing of the Artists by the Engineers' (built of text, wildly unstable and utterly unbuildable in any traditional sense) prematurely announces a victory.

One, 2,3

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

Commissioned: Stanley Picker Public Lectures, Kingston School of Art, ACTS online series

‘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.

precursor:

Internal Dissolve (2018)

Newsprint publication
60 cm x 30cm

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)

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.’

We Are the Road (2018)

Video 10:15

Screened:
London Film Festival BFI, London (2018)
Technologies Of The Self. SUPER LUX Scotland (2019)
TLC Casa Victor Hugo, Havana, Cuba. October (2017)
TLC Gotland Art Museum, Visby, Sweden (2017)

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.

Extract: 2 minutes

External Light Source (2018-2019)

Perfromance installation with Alice Rekab

Temple Bar Gallery + Studios, Dublin
The Stanley Picker Gallery, London
Five Years Gallery, London

Script v.1 (extract)

(In the gallery space, a light change from general exhibition setting to darkness except for the screens)
MUSIC begins to play loudly.

(Spotlight on RONALD and spotlight on THE CRAB as the dialogue, a bad natured interview, begins)

RONALD: So I notice that you are here with a crab, I think it’s a crab, I hope you will allow me to continue with my line of questioning even if I have misidentified the subject, it’s irrelevant to me. One thing can stand for another in a fairly imprecise way as long as you can be precise about the connection. So, perhaps I am taking a liberty by turning the crab thing into an algae thing, but that it crawls out of the water is the important thing, crawling out of the water and being in the sun...

The Grand Alliance (2016)

Solo exhibition: text, installation, web, sculpture, photography

Exhibited, Quick Millions, London (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.

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

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)

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

-Benjamin Cook, LUX

Placement does not explain, but cultivates a September garden (2020)

WAP collaboration (ldetails below)

Camden Art Centre
Commission: Public Knowledge Programme

Placement does not explain… abridges the writing of contemporary American poet Rosemarie Waldrop, whose recent appellation ‘gap gardening’ refers to the productive interstices between words, and between worlds.

We Are Publication’s ‘garden’ extends the group’s interest in jointly conducted research and speculative approaches to publishing. Its preliminary ‘groundwork’ took the form of a custom-made newspaper comprising images and texts generated specifically for the purpose of reassemblage by contributors under conditions of lockdown and separation.

As Waldrop suggests, the placement of words (and plants) generates intermedial zones of transformation and potential as much as it might propagate meaning and fixed territories. We Are Publication’s cultivation of such border zones includes amongst others 1980s pop chanteuse Elkie Brookes, cuttings specialist William Burroughs and an errant Cottingley fairy, each recast as unlikely gardeners within an expansive domain undergoing repeated sonic and visual disturbance.

We Art Publication (WAP)

2015 - 2025

Full details at
www.wearepublication.com

The artists group We Are Publication (WAP) embraces an open and unbound notion of what it means to publish. Collage, cut-up and fragmentation are WAP’s central modes of operation which allow the group to explore multi-form, poly-vocal and durational publications comprising sound, video, posters, sculptural forms, carpets, immersive media, broadcast, performance and printed matter. As such, WAP’s activities form assemblages of encounters and materials that test out and expand what it means to make public.

We Are Publication has produced speculative publications including a radio broadcast and vinyl record Diagram of an Hour (Resonance FM, London, 2016, Curved Pressing, 2017); a handmade rug Notes on a Carpet (Five Years, London, Focal Point Gallery’s Unit Twenty-One, Southend-on- Sea and the London Art Book Fair, Whitechapel Gallery 2017–2018); the exhibition We.Are.Cut.Up. (Pratt Institute, New York and Radiophrenia, CCA Glasgow 2019); and t h e H O L D took place at the Stanley Picker Gallery, Kingston, an exhibition accompanied by a series of live events. Recent video work, Placement does not explain, but cultivates a September garden formed part of London’s Camden Arts Centre, Public Knowledgeprogramme in September 2020, and a print iteration from 2021 was published as an article in KOKO journal.

Core members: Jonathan Allen, Rachel Cattle, Jenna Collins, Volker Eichelmann, John Hughes, Christian Newby, Andrea Stokes