Ed Atkins, the British contemporary artist, will display his exhibition at Tate Britain, making this the most significant UK survey exhibition. The exhibit will be held April 2- August 25, 2025, at Tate Britain, Millbank, London SW1P 4RG.
Atkins, known for his video art and poetry, is based in Copenhagen. A multitude of work that focuses on computer-generated videos and animations. His purpose is to combine contemporary technologies in unexpected and creative ways. Atkins hopes to bridge the gap between the digital world and human feeling. His extensive work was featured in the New Museum, New York: K21, Dusseldorf, and many others. Atkins has also received awards like the Jerwood/Film and Video Umbrella Award. Creating art and using techniques from cinema, the digital world, music, literature, and theater, he wanted to analyze the themes between reality, realism, and fiction.
The exhibit will feature his work from the last 15 years, including writing, paintings, embroideries, and drawings. Atkins draws from his experiences and emotions to compare technology, intimacy, love, and loss.
A design element introduced in the exhibit shows a pattern of repetition and difference. The artwork will be placed across rooms, and its format will be repeated or altered for the audience to view. Introducing familiarity, confusion, incoherence, and interruption into Atkins’ pieces to reimagine the messy reality of life. Atkins’ vision is to make the audience experience more complex and less contained it becomes.
The start of the exhibit features video production of two works, Death Mask II and Cur. Due to the “intoxication, rejection and abandonment,” Atkins finds a voice through the visuals and auditory syntax. He found his medium through video technologies, embracing things that some may find disturbing.
His later works illustrate this through computer-generated animation. The audience will find some material more explicit than others, especially a reference to the video game engine Hisser from 2015. Many animation scenes were Atkin’s performances through recordings like The Worm in 2021.
Atkins reveals important threads in his work. Loss and Self-Portraiture play an essential part in the exhibit. Feelings of loss convey due to the death of his father and his daughter’s illness. A film exploring those events, made with poet Steven Zultanski, will premiere at the exhibition. Self- Portraiture highlights realistic drawings of Atkin’s face and limbs. He draws his body in a contemporary self-identity that is unrecognizable. The work balances themes of realities, artifice, and everyday life.
