Pil and Galia Kollectiv

"We didn’t really know that much about art when we came to London. We’d heard about Goldsmiths because the band Blur had gone there and we vaguely knew Damien Hirst had made a video for them and had also gone to Goldsmiths. We didn’t even like Blur that much, but we had this notion that if you were into bands, you went to art school, and London seemed to be the epicentre of this sort of thing.

We were attracted to the emphasis on theory and the lack of separation between artistic disciplines at Goldsmiths. We got many things from our time here, the most valuable of which is probably an enduring network of international contacts that has allowed us to establish a career as artists. We found ourselves part of an intellectual community where art was discussed critically through a strong engagement with political and philosophical concepts.

We found the teaching at Goldsmiths incredibly useful, in particular Suhail Malik’s lecture series and reading seminars, which gave us insight into ideas we had not encountered before. The workshops were fantastic and the staff introduced us to new ways of making with patience and dedication.

Many of the things we were told during our degree only made sense a couple of years later. We had a lot to learn about the artworld and its institutions, and initially we were just excited to be in London and probably couldn’t take it all in, but the feedback we got on our early attempts at a collaborative art practice was very useful, and we continue to refer to some comments that were made then when we think about projects now.

We went on to do a PhD at Goldsmiths because we saw it as one of the few places devoted to the kind of critical thinking about art we were interested in, and an institution singularly committed to supporting new methodologies, including collaborative work."