the meaning of style looks at ways in which subcultures circulate between different historical, ethnic, and social contexts. The short film features a group of anti-fascist Malay skinheads who are part of a subculture formed in the 1990s. Filmed in Penang, Malaysia in a series of contemplative and languorous scenes set in an Indian Tamil cinema, a Chinese Buddhist temple, and a colonial-era mansion, they appear to move between the imaginative and literal spaces of cinema.

The visual signifiers are all there: shaved heads, polo T-shirts, bomber jackets, braces, leather boots. An attitude of streetwise cool and playful rowdiness. But the masculine aggression that has come to define skinheads is absent. They reinterpret the style of this typically British subculture and, bridging time and space, restore it to its original, progressive meaning— formulated in the 1960s as an expression of sympathy between Anglo and Caribbean working-class youth—within their post-colonial South-Asian context.

A dreamlike soundtrack by Welsh musician Gruff Rhys and the band Y Niwl moves the film toward something that is neither an imaginary pop video nor a visual experiment but more socially and culturally compelling, connected to the universal desire to belong while staking out zones and modes of independence.

Phil Collins is a visual artist and filmmaker based in Berlin and Wuppertal, Germany. Over the last two decades he has gained recognition for ambitious projects which are rooted in a close relationship with place, people and communities. Manifesting as films, installations, performative situations and live events, his work foregrounds the aspects of lived experience, the radical potential of empathy and connection, and voices that have often been disregarded or suppressed. Across geographies, ethnicities, languages and social classes, Collins’ approach is guided by a commitment to long-term process and engagement with the local context. Over the years his collaborators have included, amongst others, the youth of Baghdad, Kosovan-Albanian refugees, Palestinian disco dancers, friends and lovers in Belgrade, protagonists of Turkish and British reality TV, the homeless population of Cologne, the stars of Mexican telenovelas, teachers of Marxism-Leninism from the former German Democratic Republic, and men incarcerated in one of the United States' largest maximum security prisons. Collins is Professor of Video and Performance at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne.