LONDON.- Tate Britain presents the largest UK survey exhibition to date of Ed Atkins (b. Oxford, 1982). One of the most influential British artists working today, Atkins is best known for his computer-generated videos and animations. Repurposing contemporary technologies in unexpected ways, his work traces the dwindling gap between the digital world and human feeling. He borrows techniques from cinema, video games, literature, music and theatre to examine the relationship between reality, realism and fiction.
Explore the Cutting-Edge Video Art of Ed Atkins: Delve into his recent New Museum installation with this insightful book.
This exhibition features moving image works from the last 15 years alongside writing, paintings, embroideries and drawings. In these works, the artist uses his own experiences, feelings and body as models to mediate between technology and themes of intimacy, love and loss. Together, they pit a weightless digital life against the physical world of heft, craft and touch.
Repetition and difference act as a structural device throughout the show. Atkins splits artworks across rooms, repeats them or alters their format. He wants to induce a sense of the familiar made strange, of digression, mistake, confusion, incoherence and interruption. For him, this exhibition represents a reimagining of the messy reality of life: the more we experience, the more complex and less contained it becomes.
The exhibition begins with two early video works: Death Mask II and Cur, both from 2010. Described by Atkins as “montages of intoxication, rejection and abandonment”, these early videos announce the artist’s distinctive visual and auditory syntax, and a mood and address that can be found throughout all of his videos. These early works also introduce Atkins’ foregrounding of medium and the technologies used in their making. Whether through conspicuous lens flares or autofocus racking or seemingly involuntary blurts of audio, the artist wants us to remember that we are looking at something profoundly artificial, built to seduce and repulse.
Later works see Atkins shift into almost exclusively using computer-generated animation. Refuse.exe, from 2019, uses a video game engine to tip a stream of trash onto a stage, and Hisser, from 2015, shows a male figure, animated by Atkins’ performance, who apologises, masturbates, and falls into a sinkhole. Many of the videos are also performances of the artist, as recorded using performance capture technologies. The worm from 2021, for example, features an animated TV staging of a phone call between Atkins and his mother, while Pianowork 2 from 2024 has an extremely accurate digital double of the artist performing a minimalist piano piece.
Loss – profoundly felt and forensically scrutinised – pervades the exhibition. Atkins’ own experiences and fantasies of loss define his work; the death of his father, and his daughter’s roleplaying of fantastical sickness, form the basis of a new feature-length film Nurses Come and Go, But None for Me 2024, by Ed Atkins and Steven Zultanski, which premieres in the exhibition. In the film, Peter (Toby Jones) reads to an audience from ‘Sick Notes’, Atkins’ father’s diary, written in the last six months of his life following his cancer diagnosis. After finishing, he lies down on the floor and pretends to be sick, re-enacting a children’s game. His partner Claire (Saskia Reeves) treats him by feeding him magical concoctions and covering his face in Post-its.
Self-portraiture is another consistent thread in Atkins’ work; it is always a version of Atkins stalking his works, and more often than not, his figures – surrogates – are entirely alone. The exhibition includes realistic pencil drawings of the artist’s face and limbs as well as convincing paintings of mattresses and pillows bearing traces of absent bodies. Atkins’ neurotic examination of his own body speaks to the ever-expanding anxiety of contemporary self-identity, but also to an ancient sense of a person striving to understand something of who they are, and who they appear to be. Whether in analogue or digital form, Atkins’ works are an entanglement of reality, artifice and the psychopathology of everyday life.
At the heart of the exhibition is a mass of drawings on Post-It notes which the artist makes for his children. Atkins describes them as “miniature images of seemingly infinite invention” and “tiny, laboured, inscrutable attempts to communicate feeling.” For him, these Post-It note drawings are something like a legend at the bottom of the map, teaching us a way of looking and of feeling. The drawings are also joyful, playful, absurd, confessional, and full of love.
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