Ed Atkins

In this major retrospective, the viewer is like an avatar navigating the humans – real and CGI – that populate Atkins’ world of existential dread

Ed Atkins, Pianowork 2, 2024, installation view, Tate Britain, 2 April – 25 August 2025. © Tate Photography (Josh Croll).

Tate Britain, London
2 April – 25 August 2025

by SABINE CASPARIE

Ed Atkins’ exhibition starts with a large, white embroidery, not unlike a screen at a Japanese temple, spiritual and serene. But don’t be fooled – Atkins is not returning to the handmade in an attempt to counter our ever-more digitalised world. In fact, the work incorporates an acoustic device and takes in the sounds of the videos on the reverse. Or as Atkins words it, the embroidery is “putting out silence”.

Atkins’ words are used as labels throughout the exhibition. It is a device Tate Britain has used before and the curator, Polly Staple, tells me it proved popular with audiences. “Ed is a writer, as well as an artist who is living and breathing his voice, so it made sense to have him write the labels. It questions the authority of the museum text,” she says. Atkins also uses a more objective voice in the form of wall labels by a fictional art press. “In 1905, the composer worried. Would parents still sing to their children? If they could press play on a song with the same ease that she applies to the electric light …?” one of them reads. Here we are, more than a century later, still worrying. Will artificial intelligence take over the world? Will humans become extended computers, chips implanted in their bodies?

Ed Atkins, Death Mask II, 2010, installation view, Tate Britain, 2 April – 25 August 2025. © Tate Photography (Josh Croll).

Containing more than 60 artworks in eight rooms, the exhibition flows chronologically with the evolving technology. Atkins made Death Mask II: The Scent (2010), projected on the back of the embroidery, just after finishing art school at the Slade, which coincided with his father’s death. Strange items of fruit float in and out of focus, as does an early type of computer, its screen flicked open to transform into the back of the artist’s head. Things are leaking: flames of candles, a jet-black fluid. A recording of various domestic sounds is mixed with an ominous tune, a mechanical symphony of doom. It is mesmerising, capturing the state of limbo that grief can entail.

Ed Atkins, Hisser, 2015, installation view, Tate Britain, 2 April – 25 August 2025. © Tate Photography (Josh Croll).

Hisser (2015) contains three large screens all showing a man – a customised stock-figure Atkins bought from the online 3D marketplace TurboSquid – lying on a bed, his green eyes piercing, his face contorted in an expression of pain. The work was inspired by a story about a sinkhole under a man’s bedroom in Florida. Through a large window are visible a couple of real, unmade beds with duvets, moving up and down as if bodies were under them. A large poster on the wall with the snout of a wolf-like, grey dog (one that also appeared in Death Mask II) says: “No Fear”. I am terrified to the core.

Ed Atkins, Old Food, 2017/18, installation view, Tate Britain, 2 April – 25 August 2025. © Tate Photography (Josh Croll).

In the double-stacked racks of dusty robes in the installation Old Food (2017-18) – Atkins used costumes from Berlin’s Deutsche Oper opera house – screens pop up, too, one showing a baby with a grown man’s face and tears like dollops of grease; another an older boy in a fancy costume with his eyes wide open, his mouth in a scream. The film Pianowork 2 (2023) shows Atkins himself, CGI-ed, performing Jürg Frey’s Extended Circular Music No 2 on the piano, a monotonous sequence. “Depleted … it allegorises the failure of memory, the loss of a sense of an ending,” states the label. A purge is not forthcoming.

Ed Atkins, Good Baby, 2017. © Ed Atkins. Courtesy of the Artist, Cabinet Gallery, London, dépendance, Brussels, Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi, Berlin, and Gladstone Gallery.

Almost every artwork in the exhibition can be qualified with a verb. Its humans – whether real or projected through CGI – are breathing, crying, smoking, twisting and turning; one is even masturbating in a corner of a claustrophobic bedroom, fortunately turned away from the viewer. In a true cacophony of sound and moving image, each installation flows into the next, a clever exhibition design by Atkins in which the viewer is like an avatar in an online game, moved by an outside force. The artist’s personal emotions are directed into avatars and fed back to the audience, enlarged and disembodied – a play between the human and the theatrical.

Ed Atkins, The Worm, 2021, installation view, Tate Britain, 2 April – 25 August 2025. © Tate Photography (Josh Croll).

The Worm (2021) shows a video of an intimate conversation that Atkins had with his mother during the pandemic; their voices are authentic, but Atkins’s body is the avatar of an 80s TV show host, dressed in a suit, wearing nerdy glasses and smoking a cigarette. What can humans retain as real in the midst of all this technology, he seems to ask.

I am starting to wonder if Atkins has any hope. Does he merely feel like the character in his first feature-length film, Nurses Come and Go, But None for Me (2024), lying helplessly on the floor covered in Post-it notes, watched by an unaffectionate audience? But the last room offers a wonderful respite, like a grand finale of the real. Hundreds of Post-it note drawings, made for his daughter during the pandemic, show snippets of everyday life, intimate and humble and poetic. Like the various self-portraits dispersed between the screens, they reveal Atkins as a truly versatile artist.

Still from Nurses Come and Go, But None For Me, 2024. Video and sound. © Ed Atkins and Steven Zultanski. Commissioned and produced by Hartwig Art Foundation.

Reading Atkins’ book Flower, published by Fitzcarraldo Editions this year, supports the curators’ goal that we see Atkins not so much as the ultimate voice on technology, but as an observer of, what he calls in one of the exhibition labels, the “microscopically huge”. The book is one long stream of consciousness about everything from the fine distinctions between different kinds of wraps to a piece of glass in his foot that he imagines “will outlast the meat around it and even my coffin”. There is humour here, too, something mostly missing from the artworks.

I am reminded of the words of painter RB Kitaj (which he took in turn from Hannah Arendt) accompanying an exhibition Kitaj curated in London, The Human Clay (1976). Kitaj compared the artist to a “pearl diver”, looking for the essence. Atkins is the reverse: he is diving for the grit, an archaeologist of the ugly and the sad. Yet what he finds there is arguably more interesting and more human than the pearl: our maddening, messy, melancholy lives. No one lays out existential dread with more precision than Atkins.