Phoebe Collings-James: The subtle rules the dense is on view at KINDL – Centre for Contemporary Art, Berlin
September 14, 2025 – February 15, 2026
Phoebe Collings-James is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans ceramics, drawing, text, and sound. Their multifaceted works explore violence, desire, eroticism, and anti-colonial practices. The KINDL presents their first institutional solo exhibition in Germany, featuring ceramic sculptures and a newly created sound piece.
Collings-James discovered ceramics in 2014 during a residency in Nove, northern Italy. The artist was immediately fascinated by the physical and metaphorical transformation of clay – from soft to hard, malleable to enduring – and soon began integrating ceramic forms into their performances and installations. Today, it is their primary medium, approached with urgency as well as political and material openness. Collings-James rejects the Western separation between “fine art” and “craft”, regarding it as part of a broader cultural system that has long divided and hierarchised knowledge, practices, and bodies. This system also binds questions of origin, class, gender, and access to education together with colonial power relations.
The exhibition title The subtle rules the dense is drawn from a book on tarot and refers to a central theme in Collings-James’s artistic thinking: the relationship between visible and hidden forces, material density and atmospheric charge. The title also names a series of hand-formed ceramic torsos. These richly decorated clay armours draw inspiration from West African body masks of the Yoruba and Makonde peoples, as well as Roman armour the artist encountered in an antiques shop. At the KINDL, one work from the series is presented as a freestanding sculpture, shifting its effect: the flat, mask-like figure gains corporeal volume and an almost lifelike presence. For the first time in an exhibition, a ceramic torso is shown in dialogue with the Infidels: with their elongated necks, wide-open mouths, and anthropomorphic features, these sculptures appear as hybrids of figure, vessel, and mythological being. They are modelled on West African and Caribbean coiling techniques used to make clay vessels. The gaping mouths seem to scream or sing, their silent cries suggesting a hidden resonance that takes shape in the viewer’s imagination.
Unheard tones also resonate in the two works a mouthpiece for Terry I and II (2025): unfired blocks of red clay pierced with brass mouthpieces from wind instruments – a tribute to the North American artist and musician Terry Adkins. Sound plays a decisive role in Collings-James’s practice. The sound work Elysium Fields Avenue (2025), created for the exhibition, weaves together field recordings from London and New Orleans with additional passages into an acoustic composition. This delicate soundscape gently unfolds across the space, subtly connecting the sculptures.
Also on view at the KINDL are works from the ongoing series Clay Paintings (blood line; ever new; a rose, a bridge, a house, 2025). Their surfaces are inscribed with engraved lines, signs, and snippets of images, appearing like fragments of dreams or entries from a private visual diary. In the brightly lit exhibition space, the works punctuate the walls like a dream sequence, where drawing and engraving merge with colour and sculptural relief. This method of inscribing, reworking, and layering runs throughout Collings-James’s practice, forming a poetic foundation on which their practice continues to grow and evolve.
Curator: Katherina Perlongo. As part of Berlin Art Week 2025.
Phoebe Collings-James (b. 1987 in London, lives in London) has performed as a sound and performance artist at the Getty Museum, Los Angeles (2019), Sonic Acts, Amsterdam (2019), Cafe Oto, London (2019), Borealis Festival, Bergen (2019), Wysing Arts Centre, Cambridge (2018), and Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2018). As part of the collective Black Obsidian Sound System (B.O.S.S.) they participated in the Liverpool Biennial (2021) and were nominated for the Turner Prize. In 2019 they founded the ceramics studio Mudbelly in London, which offers free ceramics courses for Black people led by Black ceramicists. Solo exhibitions (selection): SculptureCenter, New York (2024); Camden Arts Centre, London (2021). Group exhibitions (selection): Kunstverein Hamburg (2024); Foundling Museum, London (2024); Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool (2024); The Courtauld Gallery, London (2023); Warwick Arts Centre, Coventry (2023); High Art Arles (2022); Kunsthalle Düsseldorf (2021); FACT Liverpool (2019).
Contact
info@kindl-berlin.de
KINDL – Centre for Contemporary Art
Am Sudhaus 3
12053 Berlin
Germany
Captions
- Installation views, Phoebe Collings-James. The subtle rules the dense, KINDL – Centre for Contemporary Art, Maschinenhaus M1. Photo: Jens Ziehe, 2025
- Phoebe Collings-James, The subtle rules the dense, 2021 (Detail), Glazed ceramic. © Phoebe Collings-James
- Phoebe Collings-James, Infidel (Innervisions), 2025, glazed stoneware ceramic on a steel base, 72 x 40 x 40 cm. Photography: Hugard & Vanoverschelde. Courtesy: the artist and Arcadia Missa, London
- Phoebe Collings-James, Infidel (yarrow), 2025, glazed stoneware ceramic on a steel base, 72 x 30 x 22 cm. Photography: Hugard & Vanoverschelde. Courtesy: the artist and Arcadia Missa, London
- Phoebe Collings-James, The subtle rules the dense, 2021, Glazed ceramic. Photography: Rob Harris. Courtesy: the artist and Arcadia Missa, London
- Phoebe Collings-James, Infidel (devils chariot), 2025, glazed stoneware ceramic on a steel base, 54,5 x 26 x 18 cm. Photography: Hugard & Vanoverschelde. Courtesy: the artist and Arcadia Missa, London
- Phoebe Collings-James, a mouthpiece for Terry I, 2025, red unfired clay and brass, 30 x 22.5 x 22.5 cm. Photography: Hugard & Vanoverschelde. Courtesy: the artist and Mendes Wood DM, São Paulo, Brussels, Paris, New York
