Ed Atkins

Tate Britain (London), Apr-Aug/25

I first saw Ed Atkins’s work at an exhibition alongside the American Bruce Nauman back in 2014. Held at Kunsthalle Mainz in Germany, this institutional show aimed to bring together two artists from different generations working with digital media, moving image, sculpture, and installation. Apart from the use of similar mediums, both share a profound interest in portraying the human experience, delving into an existential enquiry into the complexities of what it means to be human. A universal and never-ending question.

Over a decade later, I reencountered Atkins’s work and revisited these same topics, albeit through distinct ways, at his ambitious retrospective at London’s Tate Britain. The solo show, on view through August 2025, features a large selection of moving image works spanning 15 years of his career. It is spread across 8 gallery rooms, and each space includes passages and reflections written in the first person by Atkins. Right from the beginning I could sense that I was entering the artist’s highly personal inner world. The world of someone who is in touch with his own deepest emotions, and oftentimes his fragilities and vulnerabilities, yet achieves to turn them into tangible art forms.

Media technologies have significantly changed and improved in the past ten years, and the 2015 computer-generated video “Hisser”, one of the first works in the exhibition, embodies some of these aspects. Although hyper-realistic, the aesthetics of “Hisser” hold an eerie quality. The artificial images recall the graphics of video games and animated movies of the late 2000s, invoking an ambiguous temporality that may confuse the viewer. As for the narrative, the human-like digital figure goes through a series of unexpected events, since the piece allegedly references a news story that reported a man who was swallowed by a literal hole that opened in his bedroom.

Atkins is known for his early exploration of computer-generated imagery (CGI) before it was popularised by the mainstream media. In the CGI animation “The Worm” (2021), he presents a sound recording of a real telephone call between him and his mother during the Covid-19 lockdown. The video shows a well-dressed man answering a call while seated in what appears to be a TV studio. The portrayed digital figure was produced with performance-capture technology, in which Atkins himself was covered by motion capture sensors. The whole scenario emulates a nostalgic ambiance, typical of the 1980s and 1990s (in this piece, Atkins was inspired by the famous 1994 television interview with the British writer Dennis Potter, who was terminally ill with cancer at the time). In a way, “The Worm” foregrounds a poignant and honest self-portrait of the artist while capturing the fallibility and contradiction of digital reproduction: the video is so realistic that it looks like a simulacrum, a representation of something that has never existed in “real” life.

Deviating from the digital realm, the exhibition also features a series of paintings and drawings, including some fascinating drawings made with Post-its. Produced in 2020, Atkins began doodling these as small daily gifts to his daughter, but they gradually became an extensive archival record of day-to-day life in the middle of the pandemic. Displayed side by side as a sequence, these little works on paper comment on the elements that shape a person’s routine, from its ordinary and repetitive nature to the uniqueness and value of each day, ultimately building toward the bigger picture of life and the multiple questions that surround it. At a time when it was only possible to connect online, the handmade drawing becomes a rare and meaningful gesture.

This exhibition, therefore, invites us to reflect upon the boundaries between art and life in our post-digital, hyper-connected world, or perhaps the absence of these boundaries. As Atkins puts it, “My life and work are inextricable”.

Carol Fucci for London Art Walk
April 2025