FAME blasts out of the stereo as the two young men sit slumped against a bright pink wall, their heads lolling with exhaustion.

Then the image shifts and there’s a group of teenagers in jeans and trainers dancing energetically against the same neon backdrop.

This is They Shoot Horses, the video art work that helped get Runcorn-born Phil Collins nominated for the 2006 Turner Prize.

He filmed a group of young people taking part in an eight-hour dancethon in a Ramallah community centre, across the road from a mosque.

Since the work was completed in 2004, it has rarely been out of display, and will be one of the highlights of FACT’s My War exhibition when it opens tomorrow.

Collins, who grew up in Frodsham, acted as DJ, bouncer, cameraman and lighting technician to create the piece after a series of auditions held in the city.

“When I first went to the West Bank, I didn’t know whether people knew who Beyoncé was, or whether they would wear trainers because all of the imagery that came out of that place at that time was about things like the Intifada or burning flags or Islam,” says the 39-year-old artist.

“I think there’s so many cruelties attached to life there – there’s such limited access to the outside world, to being able to travel or people being able to return or visit and the state of education is harrowing – that there is an everyday heroism to people achieving a sense of normalcy.”

In creating the films, there were unexpected difficulties – powercuts on the second day of filming set the project back several hours, and one of the tapes went missing in transit across the border.

“It was a really good one. It had Nutbush City Limits and Pink Cadillac – real classics – but thank God it wasn’t the last hour,” says Collins, who has stayed in touch with people he met in Ramallah and revisited the West Bank last year.

“It might resurface one day. Maybe somebody’s watching a bunch of Palestinians dancing to Ike and Tina Turner right now,” he laughs.

“When I suggested a disco dance marathon, of course people really questioned it. They said why not go and film a checkpoint. People are just going to think we’re having a party.

“I said ‘No, they’ll have a much more sophisticated understanding of what people are about’.

“It’s about duration and task-based performance, but it touches on exploitation as much as it does seduction – what does it mean for nine young people in the West Bank to dance for museum goers in Britain for a working day?”

Collins left Cheshire in the late-80s to study at college in Manchester, where he also worked at Factory Records’ famous nightclub, The Hacienda.

There, he had “an absolutely brilliant time” except when working on the cloakroom: “At the end of the night, when 2,000 people came to ask for their identical black puffer jackets, circa 1990, and nobody had a ticket, it wasn’t the happiest moment for me!”

He is currently living in Berlin, where he is working on a project for the city’s Biennial in June, based on people who taught Marxism at school before 1989.

“There was this amazing change with the Berlin Wall coming down, and everybody who taught that system went to school the next day and didn’t know what to teach any more,” he explains.

FACT’s My War exhibition will explore conflict in a digitally networked world through the work of 12 international artists, whose pieces investigate the realities and myths of war at a time when the boundaries between the public and the private are being steadily eroded. It is made up of two different strands, the first a radically personal approach to war and the second looking at the ways web technologies have infiltrated global wars.

MY WAR is at FACT until May 30.