.jpg)
Where physical meets digital: Tate Britain curator Nathan Ladd on staging Ed Atkins’ major new show
One of the most influential British artists working today gets his own major retrospective
By
Adam Wells
April 2, 2025
There’s a deliberate discomfort to much of Ed Atkins’ work; CGI figures straight out of the uncanny valley stare straight out at their audience, moving just unnaturally enough to trigger a knee-jerk flight response. And yet, when they open their mouths to speak with Atkins’ trademark vulnerability, their imperfections become all-too-human, cumulatively building an unguarded self-portrait across Tate Britain’s major new exhibition looking back over the last fifteen years of the artist’s work. At its opening, we sat down with curator Nathan Ladd to discuss the process of putting this haunting show together.
It feels very timely to stage an exhibition based so entirely around digital works that feel uniquely personal to the artist. Was staging this exhibition a conscious response to various developing technologies?
I think a lot of people’s first awareness and understanding of Ed Atkins is as a creator of digital video. The earliest work in this show is from 2010, when he’d just left Slade School of Fine Art and was experimenting with this brand-new digital video technology, which progressed with CGI developments over time. We wanted to counterbalance that with the breadth of his practice; people may be less familiar with his drawing, his writing, his work on embroidery, and the sculptural elements of the show, including huge racks of costumes. So, while it felt important to platform video, we also wanted to showcase his work's diversity.
It’s definitely interesting to enter a digital art exhibition and be immediately met with large-scale embroidery…
Exactly - that was a very deliberate curatorial decision we worked on with Ed: what’s the first thing we want people to encounter? Actually, this starkly analogue object of old linen contains white embroidered text. It’s hard to discern, but it is actually very important because it comes from his father's diary when he was undergoing cancer treatment. It becomes a kind of foundational text later on in the new feature-length film, where the show ends.
It feels like the works play with the space itself, like mapping the elasticity of digital space onto the physical gallery space…
We were very conscious of video works in museums and the viewing experience. There’s a tradition where you would move from a single ‘black box’ space to another, encountering a film in full before moving on to the next. What we wanted to do here is treat every space as a unique material, sonic and sensorial feel, to make each room feel different, so visitors will move from a black box space to a really open gallery with a glass wall that allows you to see into the next space. It creates a porosity between the works, allowing conversation between them. So many of Atkins’ works, although they manifest themselves in different ways, reveal more layers when placed in proximity to each other.
Is this a deliberate echo of the contemporary digital world, where it feels like so many things are competing for attention?
We also didn’t want to confine any piece to its own space. These beautiful points of overlap between different sonic elements of the works are actually quite intentional. When you’re in front of a piece, you can see and hear its details quite clearly, but as you start to move between spaces, you’re pulled away by the sound of another one, calling for your attention amongst other artworks.
Even though they’re demanding your attention, they never feel broad - once you arrive, they reveal themselves as very intimate…
Absolutely, we wanted to play with the scale and space of the exhibition to afford visitors the intimacy of connection with individual works while also creating space for them to physically navigate the exhibition.
Atkins takes on a sort of physicality throughout the works, which often revolve around his own body, even if it’s digital recreation. Was the aim here to give visitors more awareness of their own presence in the space?
I guess Atkins’ presence is felt in many different ways throughout the exhibition - even in the early CGI work in the show; he depicts his own voice and body through the rudimentary performance capture of the time. He was able to animate his own figure via digital self-portraiture, which is a theme throughout his career, including the meticulous drawings of his own face. This extends to the interpretation of the whole show - the wall texts are all in his own voice, allowing the visitor to really hear him speak about his own work.
There also seems to be an emphasis on the act of creation itself; you can see the mechanism which powers the work Bed, and the show closes with behind-the-scenes photos…
And I think that’s a very important material gesture - the nature of CGI video is that there’s always an ultimate failure. It cannot truly replicate the real, so there’s a conspicuous exposure of the artifice behind all these works. It’s inherent in the pieces themselves. It felt fitting to allow visitors to see the physical, technological underbelly that powers the various works.
Some elements of the show deliberately evoke a sense of artistic revulsion - he even describes Voilà la vérité (a work in which a segment of Dimitri Kirsanoff’s 1926 film Ménilmontant is digitally colourised, smoothed and soundtracked) as sacrilegious…
Yeah, it’s really interesting in the context of this exhibition. Although the newest film in the exhibition (Nurses Come and Go, But None for Me) is Ed’s first live-action work, this obviously was live-action when it was shot. He’s used a series of AI-supported software to ‘upscale’ and re-render it, as well as working with a foley artist to generate sound that was obviously never recorded at the time. The result is this haunted video, as well as a short essay on cinema as an illusion - to take something that’s archival and transform it into something contemporary, where the addition of ‘realism’ paradoxically makes it more artificial.
Do you see these works as new technology being used to explore existing themes of personhood and identity? Or are these themes being used to interrogate the technology itself?
Ed is essentially repurposing a lot of things. On the one hand, it’s technologies, theatre, literature, video games, and performance - they’re all entangled in a sense of self. His interest is in finding the limits of these technologies, questioning where they break down and where they fail in their inability to truly represent the self. At the same time, he talks about how these CGI avatars act as surrogates for himself and afford him a space where he can explore this emotionality, his memories, and his own experiences.
Ed Atkins is showing at Tate Britain until 25 August.
There’s a deliberate discomfort to much of Ed Atkins’ work; CGI figures straight out of the uncanny valley stare straight out at their audience, moving just unnaturally enough to trigger a knee-jerk flight response. And yet, when they open their mouths to speak with Atkins’ trademark vulnerability, their imperfections become all-too-human, cumulatively building an unguarded self-portrait across Tate Britain’s major new exhibition looking back over the last fifteen years of the artist’s work. At its opening, we sat down with curator Nathan Ladd to discuss the process of putting this haunting show together.
It feels very timely to stage an exhibition based so entirely around digital works that feel uniquely personal to the artist. Was staging this exhibition a conscious response to various developing technologies?
I think a lot of people’s first awareness and understanding of Ed Atkins is as a creator of digital video. The earliest work in this show is from 2010, when he’d just left Slade School of Fine Art and was experimenting with this brand-new digital video technology, which progressed with CGI developments over time. We wanted to counterbalance that with the breadth of his practice; people may be less familiar with his drawing, his writing, his work on embroidery, and the sculptural elements of the show, including huge racks of costumes. So, while it felt important to platform video, we also wanted to showcase his work's diversity.
It’s definitely interesting to enter a digital art exhibition and be immediately met with large-scale embroidery…
Exactly - that was a very deliberate curatorial decision we worked on with Ed: what’s the first thing we want people to encounter? Actually, this starkly analogue object of old linen contains white embroidered text. It’s hard to discern, but it is actually very important because it comes from his father's diary when he was undergoing cancer treatment. It becomes a kind of foundational text later on in the new feature-length film, where the show ends.
It feels like the works play with the space itself, like mapping the elasticity of digital space onto the physical gallery space…
We were very conscious of video works in museums and the viewing experience. There’s a tradition where you would move from a single ‘black box’ space to another, encountering a film in full before moving on to the next. What we wanted to do here is treat every space as a unique material, sonic and sensorial feel, to make each room feel different, so visitors will move from a black box space to a really open gallery with a glass wall that allows you to see into the next space. It creates a porosity between the works, allowing conversation between them. So many of Atkins’ works, although they manifest themselves in different ways, reveal more layers when placed in proximity to each other.
Is this a deliberate echo of the contemporary digital world, where it feels like so many things are competing for attention?
We also didn’t want to confine any piece to its own space. These beautiful points of overlap between different sonic elements of the works are actually quite intentional. When you’re in front of a piece, you can see and hear its details quite clearly, but as you start to move between spaces, you’re pulled away by the sound of another one, calling for your attention amongst other artworks.
Even though they’re demanding your attention, they never feel broad - once you arrive, they reveal themselves as very intimate…
Absolutely, we wanted to play with the scale and space of the exhibition to afford visitors the intimacy of connection with individual works while also creating space for them to physically navigate the exhibition.
Atkins takes on a sort of physicality throughout the works, which often revolve around his own body, even if it’s digital recreation. Was the aim here to give visitors more awareness of their own presence in the space?
I guess Atkins’ presence is felt in many different ways throughout the exhibition - even in the early CGI work in the show; he depicts his own voice and body through the rudimentary performance capture of the time. He was able to animate his own figure via digital self-portraiture, which is a theme throughout his career, including the meticulous drawings of his own face. This extends to the interpretation of the whole show - the wall texts are all in his own voice, allowing the visitor to really hear him speak about his own work.
There also seems to be an emphasis on the act of creation itself; you can see the mechanism which powers the work Bed, and the show closes with behind-the-scenes photos…
And I think that’s a very important material gesture - the nature of CGI video is that there’s always an ultimate failure. It cannot truly replicate the real, so there’s a conspicuous exposure of the artifice behind all these works. It’s inherent in the pieces themselves. It felt fitting to allow visitors to see the physical, technological underbelly that powers the various works.
Some elements of the show deliberately evoke a sense of artistic revulsion - he even describes Voilà la vérité (a work in which a segment of Dimitri Kirsanoff’s 1926 film Ménilmontant is digitally colourised, smoothed and soundtracked) as sacrilegious…
Yeah, it’s really interesting in the context of this exhibition. Although the newest film in the exhibition (Nurses Come and Go, But None for Me) is Ed’s first live-action work, this obviously was live-action when it was shot. He’s used a series of AI-supported software to ‘upscale’ and re-render it, as well as working with a foley artist to generate sound that was obviously never recorded at the time. The result is this haunted video, as well as a short essay on cinema as an illusion - to take something that’s archival and transform it into something contemporary, where the addition of ‘realism’ paradoxically makes it more artificial.
Do you see these works as new technology being used to explore existing themes of personhood and identity? Or are these themes being used to interrogate the technology itself?
Ed is essentially repurposing a lot of things. On the one hand, it’s technologies, theatre, literature, video games, and performance - they’re all entangled in a sense of self. His interest is in finding the limits of these technologies, questioning where they break down and where they fail in their inability to truly represent the self. At the same time, he talks about how these CGI avatars act as surrogates for himself and afford him a space where he can explore this emotionality, his memories, and his own experiences.
Ed Atkins is showing at Tate Britain until 25 August.
There’s a deliberate discomfort to much of Ed Atkins’ work; CGI figures straight out of the uncanny valley stare straight out at their audience, moving just unnaturally enough to trigger a knee-jerk flight response. And yet, when they open their mouths to speak with Atkins’ trademark vulnerability, their imperfections become all-too-human, cumulatively building an unguarded self-portrait across Tate Britain’s major new exhibition looking back over the last fifteen years of the artist’s work. At its opening, we sat down with curator Nathan Ladd to discuss the process of putting this haunting show together.
It feels very timely to stage an exhibition based so entirely around digital works that feel uniquely personal to the artist. Was staging this exhibition a conscious response to various developing technologies?
I think a lot of people’s first awareness and understanding of Ed Atkins is as a creator of digital video. The earliest work in this show is from 2010, when he’d just left Slade School of Fine Art and was experimenting with this brand-new digital video technology, which progressed with CGI developments over time. We wanted to counterbalance that with the breadth of his practice; people may be less familiar with his drawing, his writing, his work on embroidery, and the sculptural elements of the show, including huge racks of costumes. So, while it felt important to platform video, we also wanted to showcase his work's diversity.
It’s definitely interesting to enter a digital art exhibition and be immediately met with large-scale embroidery…
Exactly - that was a very deliberate curatorial decision we worked on with Ed: what’s the first thing we want people to encounter? Actually, this starkly analogue object of old linen contains white embroidered text. It’s hard to discern, but it is actually very important because it comes from his father's diary when he was undergoing cancer treatment. It becomes a kind of foundational text later on in the new feature-length film, where the show ends.
It feels like the works play with the space itself, like mapping the elasticity of digital space onto the physical gallery space…
We were very conscious of video works in museums and the viewing experience. There’s a tradition where you would move from a single ‘black box’ space to another, encountering a film in full before moving on to the next. What we wanted to do here is treat every space as a unique material, sonic and sensorial feel, to make each room feel different, so visitors will move from a black box space to a really open gallery with a glass wall that allows you to see into the next space. It creates a porosity between the works, allowing conversation between them. So many of Atkins’ works, although they manifest themselves in different ways, reveal more layers when placed in proximity to each other.
Is this a deliberate echo of the contemporary digital world, where it feels like so many things are competing for attention?
We also didn’t want to confine any piece to its own space. These beautiful points of overlap between different sonic elements of the works are actually quite intentional. When you’re in front of a piece, you can see and hear its details quite clearly, but as you start to move between spaces, you’re pulled away by the sound of another one, calling for your attention amongst other artworks.
Even though they’re demanding your attention, they never feel broad - once you arrive, they reveal themselves as very intimate…
Absolutely, we wanted to play with the scale and space of the exhibition to afford visitors the intimacy of connection with individual works while also creating space for them to physically navigate the exhibition.
Atkins takes on a sort of physicality throughout the works, which often revolve around his own body, even if it’s digital recreation. Was the aim here to give visitors more awareness of their own presence in the space?
I guess Atkins’ presence is felt in many different ways throughout the exhibition - even in the early CGI work in the show; he depicts his own voice and body through the rudimentary performance capture of the time. He was able to animate his own figure via digital self-portraiture, which is a theme throughout his career, including the meticulous drawings of his own face. This extends to the interpretation of the whole show - the wall texts are all in his own voice, allowing the visitor to really hear him speak about his own work.
There also seems to be an emphasis on the act of creation itself; you can see the mechanism which powers the work Bed, and the show closes with behind-the-scenes photos…
And I think that’s a very important material gesture - the nature of CGI video is that there’s always an ultimate failure. It cannot truly replicate the real, so there’s a conspicuous exposure of the artifice behind all these works. It’s inherent in the pieces themselves. It felt fitting to allow visitors to see the physical, technological underbelly that powers the various works.
Some elements of the show deliberately evoke a sense of artistic revulsion - he even describes Voilà la vérité (a work in which a segment of Dimitri Kirsanoff’s 1926 film Ménilmontant is digitally colourised, smoothed and soundtracked) as sacrilegious…
Yeah, it’s really interesting in the context of this exhibition. Although the newest film in the exhibition (Nurses Come and Go, But None for Me) is Ed’s first live-action work, this obviously was live-action when it was shot. He’s used a series of AI-supported software to ‘upscale’ and re-render it, as well as working with a foley artist to generate sound that was obviously never recorded at the time. The result is this haunted video, as well as a short essay on cinema as an illusion - to take something that’s archival and transform it into something contemporary, where the addition of ‘realism’ paradoxically makes it more artificial.
Do you see these works as new technology being used to explore existing themes of personhood and identity? Or are these themes being used to interrogate the technology itself?
Ed is essentially repurposing a lot of things. On the one hand, it’s technologies, theatre, literature, video games, and performance - they’re all entangled in a sense of self. His interest is in finding the limits of these technologies, questioning where they break down and where they fail in their inability to truly represent the self. At the same time, he talks about how these CGI avatars act as surrogates for himself and afford him a space where he can explore this emotionality, his memories, and his own experiences.
Ed Atkins is showing at Tate Britain until 25 August.
There’s a deliberate discomfort to much of Ed Atkins’ work; CGI figures straight out of the uncanny valley stare straight out at their audience, moving just unnaturally enough to trigger a knee-jerk flight response. And yet, when they open their mouths to speak with Atkins’ trademark vulnerability, their imperfections become all-too-human, cumulatively building an unguarded self-portrait across Tate Britain’s major new exhibition looking back over the last fifteen years of the artist’s work. At its opening, we sat down with curator Nathan Ladd to discuss the process of putting this haunting show together.
It feels very timely to stage an exhibition based so entirely around digital works that feel uniquely personal to the artist. Was staging this exhibition a conscious response to various developing technologies?
I think a lot of people’s first awareness and understanding of Ed Atkins is as a creator of digital video. The earliest work in this show is from 2010, when he’d just left Slade School of Fine Art and was experimenting with this brand-new digital video technology, which progressed with CGI developments over time. We wanted to counterbalance that with the breadth of his practice; people may be less familiar with his drawing, his writing, his work on embroidery, and the sculptural elements of the show, including huge racks of costumes. So, while it felt important to platform video, we also wanted to showcase his work's diversity.
It’s definitely interesting to enter a digital art exhibition and be immediately met with large-scale embroidery…
Exactly - that was a very deliberate curatorial decision we worked on with Ed: what’s the first thing we want people to encounter? Actually, this starkly analogue object of old linen contains white embroidered text. It’s hard to discern, but it is actually very important because it comes from his father's diary when he was undergoing cancer treatment. It becomes a kind of foundational text later on in the new feature-length film, where the show ends.
It feels like the works play with the space itself, like mapping the elasticity of digital space onto the physical gallery space…
We were very conscious of video works in museums and the viewing experience. There’s a tradition where you would move from a single ‘black box’ space to another, encountering a film in full before moving on to the next. What we wanted to do here is treat every space as a unique material, sonic and sensorial feel, to make each room feel different, so visitors will move from a black box space to a really open gallery with a glass wall that allows you to see into the next space. It creates a porosity between the works, allowing conversation between them. So many of Atkins’ works, although they manifest themselves in different ways, reveal more layers when placed in proximity to each other.
Is this a deliberate echo of the contemporary digital world, where it feels like so many things are competing for attention?
We also didn’t want to confine any piece to its own space. These beautiful points of overlap between different sonic elements of the works are actually quite intentional. When you’re in front of a piece, you can see and hear its details quite clearly, but as you start to move between spaces, you’re pulled away by the sound of another one, calling for your attention amongst other artworks.
Even though they’re demanding your attention, they never feel broad - once you arrive, they reveal themselves as very intimate…
Absolutely, we wanted to play with the scale and space of the exhibition to afford visitors the intimacy of connection with individual works while also creating space for them to physically navigate the exhibition.
Atkins takes on a sort of physicality throughout the works, which often revolve around his own body, even if it’s digital recreation. Was the aim here to give visitors more awareness of their own presence in the space?
I guess Atkins’ presence is felt in many different ways throughout the exhibition - even in the early CGI work in the show; he depicts his own voice and body through the rudimentary performance capture of the time. He was able to animate his own figure via digital self-portraiture, which is a theme throughout his career, including the meticulous drawings of his own face. This extends to the interpretation of the whole show - the wall texts are all in his own voice, allowing the visitor to really hear him speak about his own work.
There also seems to be an emphasis on the act of creation itself; you can see the mechanism which powers the work Bed, and the show closes with behind-the-scenes photos…
And I think that’s a very important material gesture - the nature of CGI video is that there’s always an ultimate failure. It cannot truly replicate the real, so there’s a conspicuous exposure of the artifice behind all these works. It’s inherent in the pieces themselves. It felt fitting to allow visitors to see the physical, technological underbelly that powers the various works.
Some elements of the show deliberately evoke a sense of artistic revulsion - he even describes Voilà la vérité (a work in which a segment of Dimitri Kirsanoff’s 1926 film Ménilmontant is digitally colourised, smoothed and soundtracked) as sacrilegious…
Yeah, it’s really interesting in the context of this exhibition. Although the newest film in the exhibition (Nurses Come and Go, But None for Me) is Ed’s first live-action work, this obviously was live-action when it was shot. He’s used a series of AI-supported software to ‘upscale’ and re-render it, as well as working with a foley artist to generate sound that was obviously never recorded at the time. The result is this haunted video, as well as a short essay on cinema as an illusion - to take something that’s archival and transform it into something contemporary, where the addition of ‘realism’ paradoxically makes it more artificial.
Do you see these works as new technology being used to explore existing themes of personhood and identity? Or are these themes being used to interrogate the technology itself?
Ed is essentially repurposing a lot of things. On the one hand, it’s technologies, theatre, literature, video games, and performance - they’re all entangled in a sense of self. His interest is in finding the limits of these technologies, questioning where they break down and where they fail in their inability to truly represent the self. At the same time, he talks about how these CGI avatars act as surrogates for himself and afford him a space where he can explore this emotionality, his memories, and his own experiences.
Ed Atkins is showing at Tate Britain until 25 August.
There’s a deliberate discomfort to much of Ed Atkins’ work; CGI figures straight out of the uncanny valley stare straight out at their audience, moving just unnaturally enough to trigger a knee-jerk flight response. And yet, when they open their mouths to speak with Atkins’ trademark vulnerability, their imperfections become all-too-human, cumulatively building an unguarded self-portrait across Tate Britain’s major new exhibition looking back over the last fifteen years of the artist’s work. At its opening, we sat down with curator Nathan Ladd to discuss the process of putting this haunting show together.
It feels very timely to stage an exhibition based so entirely around digital works that feel uniquely personal to the artist. Was staging this exhibition a conscious response to various developing technologies?
I think a lot of people’s first awareness and understanding of Ed Atkins is as a creator of digital video. The earliest work in this show is from 2010, when he’d just left Slade School of Fine Art and was experimenting with this brand-new digital video technology, which progressed with CGI developments over time. We wanted to counterbalance that with the breadth of his practice; people may be less familiar with his drawing, his writing, his work on embroidery, and the sculptural elements of the show, including huge racks of costumes. So, while it felt important to platform video, we also wanted to showcase his work's diversity.
It’s definitely interesting to enter a digital art exhibition and be immediately met with large-scale embroidery…
Exactly - that was a very deliberate curatorial decision we worked on with Ed: what’s the first thing we want people to encounter? Actually, this starkly analogue object of old linen contains white embroidered text. It’s hard to discern, but it is actually very important because it comes from his father's diary when he was undergoing cancer treatment. It becomes a kind of foundational text later on in the new feature-length film, where the show ends.
It feels like the works play with the space itself, like mapping the elasticity of digital space onto the physical gallery space…
We were very conscious of video works in museums and the viewing experience. There’s a tradition where you would move from a single ‘black box’ space to another, encountering a film in full before moving on to the next. What we wanted to do here is treat every space as a unique material, sonic and sensorial feel, to make each room feel different, so visitors will move from a black box space to a really open gallery with a glass wall that allows you to see into the next space. It creates a porosity between the works, allowing conversation between them. So many of Atkins’ works, although they manifest themselves in different ways, reveal more layers when placed in proximity to each other.
Is this a deliberate echo of the contemporary digital world, where it feels like so many things are competing for attention?
We also didn’t want to confine any piece to its own space. These beautiful points of overlap between different sonic elements of the works are actually quite intentional. When you’re in front of a piece, you can see and hear its details quite clearly, but as you start to move between spaces, you’re pulled away by the sound of another one, calling for your attention amongst other artworks.
Even though they’re demanding your attention, they never feel broad - once you arrive, they reveal themselves as very intimate…
Absolutely, we wanted to play with the scale and space of the exhibition to afford visitors the intimacy of connection with individual works while also creating space for them to physically navigate the exhibition.
Atkins takes on a sort of physicality throughout the works, which often revolve around his own body, even if it’s digital recreation. Was the aim here to give visitors more awareness of their own presence in the space?
I guess Atkins’ presence is felt in many different ways throughout the exhibition - even in the early CGI work in the show; he depicts his own voice and body through the rudimentary performance capture of the time. He was able to animate his own figure via digital self-portraiture, which is a theme throughout his career, including the meticulous drawings of his own face. This extends to the interpretation of the whole show - the wall texts are all in his own voice, allowing the visitor to really hear him speak about his own work.
There also seems to be an emphasis on the act of creation itself; you can see the mechanism which powers the work Bed, and the show closes with behind-the-scenes photos…
And I think that’s a very important material gesture - the nature of CGI video is that there’s always an ultimate failure. It cannot truly replicate the real, so there’s a conspicuous exposure of the artifice behind all these works. It’s inherent in the pieces themselves. It felt fitting to allow visitors to see the physical, technological underbelly that powers the various works.
Some elements of the show deliberately evoke a sense of artistic revulsion - he even describes Voilà la vérité (a work in which a segment of Dimitri Kirsanoff’s 1926 film Ménilmontant is digitally colourised, smoothed and soundtracked) as sacrilegious…
Yeah, it’s really interesting in the context of this exhibition. Although the newest film in the exhibition (Nurses Come and Go, But None for Me) is Ed’s first live-action work, this obviously was live-action when it was shot. He’s used a series of AI-supported software to ‘upscale’ and re-render it, as well as working with a foley artist to generate sound that was obviously never recorded at the time. The result is this haunted video, as well as a short essay on cinema as an illusion - to take something that’s archival and transform it into something contemporary, where the addition of ‘realism’ paradoxically makes it more artificial.
Do you see these works as new technology being used to explore existing themes of personhood and identity? Or are these themes being used to interrogate the technology itself?
Ed is essentially repurposing a lot of things. On the one hand, it’s technologies, theatre, literature, video games, and performance - they’re all entangled in a sense of self. His interest is in finding the limits of these technologies, questioning where they break down and where they fail in their inability to truly represent the self. At the same time, he talks about how these CGI avatars act as surrogates for himself and afford him a space where he can explore this emotionality, his memories, and his own experiences.
Ed Atkins is showing at Tate Britain until 25 August.
There’s a deliberate discomfort to much of Ed Atkins’ work; CGI figures straight out of the uncanny valley stare straight out at their audience, moving just unnaturally enough to trigger a knee-jerk flight response. And yet, when they open their mouths to speak with Atkins’ trademark vulnerability, their imperfections become all-too-human, cumulatively building an unguarded self-portrait across Tate Britain’s major new exhibition looking back over the last fifteen years of the artist’s work. At its opening, we sat down with curator Nathan Ladd to discuss the process of putting this haunting show together.
It feels very timely to stage an exhibition based so entirely around digital works that feel uniquely personal to the artist. Was staging this exhibition a conscious response to various developing technologies?
I think a lot of people’s first awareness and understanding of Ed Atkins is as a creator of digital video. The earliest work in this show is from 2010, when he’d just left Slade School of Fine Art and was experimenting with this brand-new digital video technology, which progressed with CGI developments over time. We wanted to counterbalance that with the breadth of his practice; people may be less familiar with his drawing, his writing, his work on embroidery, and the sculptural elements of the show, including huge racks of costumes. So, while it felt important to platform video, we also wanted to showcase his work's diversity.
It’s definitely interesting to enter a digital art exhibition and be immediately met with large-scale embroidery…
Exactly - that was a very deliberate curatorial decision we worked on with Ed: what’s the first thing we want people to encounter? Actually, this starkly analogue object of old linen contains white embroidered text. It’s hard to discern, but it is actually very important because it comes from his father's diary when he was undergoing cancer treatment. It becomes a kind of foundational text later on in the new feature-length film, where the show ends.
It feels like the works play with the space itself, like mapping the elasticity of digital space onto the physical gallery space…
We were very conscious of video works in museums and the viewing experience. There’s a tradition where you would move from a single ‘black box’ space to another, encountering a film in full before moving on to the next. What we wanted to do here is treat every space as a unique material, sonic and sensorial feel, to make each room feel different, so visitors will move from a black box space to a really open gallery with a glass wall that allows you to see into the next space. It creates a porosity between the works, allowing conversation between them. So many of Atkins’ works, although they manifest themselves in different ways, reveal more layers when placed in proximity to each other.
Is this a deliberate echo of the contemporary digital world, where it feels like so many things are competing for attention?
We also didn’t want to confine any piece to its own space. These beautiful points of overlap between different sonic elements of the works are actually quite intentional. When you’re in front of a piece, you can see and hear its details quite clearly, but as you start to move between spaces, you’re pulled away by the sound of another one, calling for your attention amongst other artworks.
Even though they’re demanding your attention, they never feel broad - once you arrive, they reveal themselves as very intimate…
Absolutely, we wanted to play with the scale and space of the exhibition to afford visitors the intimacy of connection with individual works while also creating space for them to physically navigate the exhibition.
Atkins takes on a sort of physicality throughout the works, which often revolve around his own body, even if it’s digital recreation. Was the aim here to give visitors more awareness of their own presence in the space?
I guess Atkins’ presence is felt in many different ways throughout the exhibition - even in the early CGI work in the show; he depicts his own voice and body through the rudimentary performance capture of the time. He was able to animate his own figure via digital self-portraiture, which is a theme throughout his career, including the meticulous drawings of his own face. This extends to the interpretation of the whole show - the wall texts are all in his own voice, allowing the visitor to really hear him speak about his own work.
There also seems to be an emphasis on the act of creation itself; you can see the mechanism which powers the work Bed, and the show closes with behind-the-scenes photos…
And I think that’s a very important material gesture - the nature of CGI video is that there’s always an ultimate failure. It cannot truly replicate the real, so there’s a conspicuous exposure of the artifice behind all these works. It’s inherent in the pieces themselves. It felt fitting to allow visitors to see the physical, technological underbelly that powers the various works.
Some elements of the show deliberately evoke a sense of artistic revulsion - he even describes Voilà la vérité (a work in which a segment of Dimitri Kirsanoff’s 1926 film Ménilmontant is digitally colourised, smoothed and soundtracked) as sacrilegious…
Yeah, it’s really interesting in the context of this exhibition. Although the newest film in the exhibition (Nurses Come and Go, But None for Me) is Ed’s first live-action work, this obviously was live-action when it was shot. He’s used a series of AI-supported software to ‘upscale’ and re-render it, as well as working with a foley artist to generate sound that was obviously never recorded at the time. The result is this haunted video, as well as a short essay on cinema as an illusion - to take something that’s archival and transform it into something contemporary, where the addition of ‘realism’ paradoxically makes it more artificial.
Do you see these works as new technology being used to explore existing themes of personhood and identity? Or are these themes being used to interrogate the technology itself?
Ed is essentially repurposing a lot of things. On the one hand, it’s technologies, theatre, literature, video games, and performance - they’re all entangled in a sense of self. His interest is in finding the limits of these technologies, questioning where they break down and where they fail in their inability to truly represent the self. At the same time, he talks about how these CGI avatars act as surrogates for himself and afford him a space where he can explore this emotionality, his memories, and his own experiences.
Ed Atkins is showing at Tate Britain until 25 August.
There’s a deliberate discomfort to much of Ed Atkins’ work; CGI figures straight out of the uncanny valley stare straight out at their audience, moving just unnaturally enough to trigger a knee-jerk flight response. And yet, when they open their mouths to speak with Atkins’ trademark vulnerability, their imperfections become all-too-human, cumulatively building an unguarded self-portrait across Tate Britain’s major new exhibition looking back over the last fifteen years of the artist’s work. At its opening, we sat down with curator Nathan Ladd to discuss the process of putting this haunting show together.
It feels very timely to stage an exhibition based so entirely around digital works that feel uniquely personal to the artist. Was staging this exhibition a conscious response to various developing technologies?
I think a lot of people’s first awareness and understanding of Ed Atkins is as a creator of digital video. The earliest work in this show is from 2010, when he’d just left Slade School of Fine Art and was experimenting with this brand-new digital video technology, which progressed with CGI developments over time. We wanted to counterbalance that with the breadth of his practice; people may be less familiar with his drawing, his writing, his work on embroidery, and the sculptural elements of the show, including huge racks of costumes. So, while it felt important to platform video, we also wanted to showcase his work's diversity.
It’s definitely interesting to enter a digital art exhibition and be immediately met with large-scale embroidery…
Exactly - that was a very deliberate curatorial decision we worked on with Ed: what’s the first thing we want people to encounter? Actually, this starkly analogue object of old linen contains white embroidered text. It’s hard to discern, but it is actually very important because it comes from his father's diary when he was undergoing cancer treatment. It becomes a kind of foundational text later on in the new feature-length film, where the show ends.
It feels like the works play with the space itself, like mapping the elasticity of digital space onto the physical gallery space…
We were very conscious of video works in museums and the viewing experience. There’s a tradition where you would move from a single ‘black box’ space to another, encountering a film in full before moving on to the next. What we wanted to do here is treat every space as a unique material, sonic and sensorial feel, to make each room feel different, so visitors will move from a black box space to a really open gallery with a glass wall that allows you to see into the next space. It creates a porosity between the works, allowing conversation between them. So many of Atkins’ works, although they manifest themselves in different ways, reveal more layers when placed in proximity to each other.
Is this a deliberate echo of the contemporary digital world, where it feels like so many things are competing for attention?
We also didn’t want to confine any piece to its own space. These beautiful points of overlap between different sonic elements of the works are actually quite intentional. When you’re in front of a piece, you can see and hear its details quite clearly, but as you start to move between spaces, you’re pulled away by the sound of another one, calling for your attention amongst other artworks.
Even though they’re demanding your attention, they never feel broad - once you arrive, they reveal themselves as very intimate…
Absolutely, we wanted to play with the scale and space of the exhibition to afford visitors the intimacy of connection with individual works while also creating space for them to physically navigate the exhibition.
Atkins takes on a sort of physicality throughout the works, which often revolve around his own body, even if it’s digital recreation. Was the aim here to give visitors more awareness of their own presence in the space?
I guess Atkins’ presence is felt in many different ways throughout the exhibition - even in the early CGI work in the show; he depicts his own voice and body through the rudimentary performance capture of the time. He was able to animate his own figure via digital self-portraiture, which is a theme throughout his career, including the meticulous drawings of his own face. This extends to the interpretation of the whole show - the wall texts are all in his own voice, allowing the visitor to really hear him speak about his own work.
There also seems to be an emphasis on the act of creation itself; you can see the mechanism which powers the work Bed, and the show closes with behind-the-scenes photos…
And I think that’s a very important material gesture - the nature of CGI video is that there’s always an ultimate failure. It cannot truly replicate the real, so there’s a conspicuous exposure of the artifice behind all these works. It’s inherent in the pieces themselves. It felt fitting to allow visitors to see the physical, technological underbelly that powers the various works.
Some elements of the show deliberately evoke a sense of artistic revulsion - he even describes Voilà la vérité (a work in which a segment of Dimitri Kirsanoff’s 1926 film Ménilmontant is digitally colourised, smoothed and soundtracked) as sacrilegious…
Yeah, it’s really interesting in the context of this exhibition. Although the newest film in the exhibition (Nurses Come and Go, But None for Me) is Ed’s first live-action work, this obviously was live-action when it was shot. He’s used a series of AI-supported software to ‘upscale’ and re-render it, as well as working with a foley artist to generate sound that was obviously never recorded at the time. The result is this haunted video, as well as a short essay on cinema as an illusion - to take something that’s archival and transform it into something contemporary, where the addition of ‘realism’ paradoxically makes it more artificial.
Do you see these works as new technology being used to explore existing themes of personhood and identity? Or are these themes being used to interrogate the technology itself?
Ed is essentially repurposing a lot of things. On the one hand, it’s technologies, theatre, literature, video games, and performance - they’re all entangled in a sense of self. His interest is in finding the limits of these technologies, questioning where they break down and where they fail in their inability to truly represent the self. At the same time, he talks about how these CGI avatars act as surrogates for himself and afford him a space where he can explore this emotionality, his memories, and his own experiences.
Ed Atkins is showing at Tate Britain until 25 August.
There’s a deliberate discomfort to much of Ed Atkins’ work; CGI figures straight out of the uncanny valley stare straight out at their audience, moving just unnaturally enough to trigger a knee-jerk flight response. And yet, when they open their mouths to speak with Atkins’ trademark vulnerability, their imperfections become all-too-human, cumulatively building an unguarded self-portrait across Tate Britain’s major new exhibition looking back over the last fifteen years of the artist’s work. At its opening, we sat down with curator Nathan Ladd to discuss the process of putting this haunting show together.
It feels very timely to stage an exhibition based so entirely around digital works that feel uniquely personal to the artist. Was staging this exhibition a conscious response to various developing technologies?
I think a lot of people’s first awareness and understanding of Ed Atkins is as a creator of digital video. The earliest work in this show is from 2010, when he’d just left Slade School of Fine Art and was experimenting with this brand-new digital video technology, which progressed with CGI developments over time. We wanted to counterbalance that with the breadth of his practice; people may be less familiar with his drawing, his writing, his work on embroidery, and the sculptural elements of the show, including huge racks of costumes. So, while it felt important to platform video, we also wanted to showcase his work's diversity.
It’s definitely interesting to enter a digital art exhibition and be immediately met with large-scale embroidery…
Exactly - that was a very deliberate curatorial decision we worked on with Ed: what’s the first thing we want people to encounter? Actually, this starkly analogue object of old linen contains white embroidered text. It’s hard to discern, but it is actually very important because it comes from his father's diary when he was undergoing cancer treatment. It becomes a kind of foundational text later on in the new feature-length film, where the show ends.
It feels like the works play with the space itself, like mapping the elasticity of digital space onto the physical gallery space…
We were very conscious of video works in museums and the viewing experience. There’s a tradition where you would move from a single ‘black box’ space to another, encountering a film in full before moving on to the next. What we wanted to do here is treat every space as a unique material, sonic and sensorial feel, to make each room feel different, so visitors will move from a black box space to a really open gallery with a glass wall that allows you to see into the next space. It creates a porosity between the works, allowing conversation between them. So many of Atkins’ works, although they manifest themselves in different ways, reveal more layers when placed in proximity to each other.
Is this a deliberate echo of the contemporary digital world, where it feels like so many things are competing for attention?
We also didn’t want to confine any piece to its own space. These beautiful points of overlap between different sonic elements of the works are actually quite intentional. When you’re in front of a piece, you can see and hear its details quite clearly, but as you start to move between spaces, you’re pulled away by the sound of another one, calling for your attention amongst other artworks.
Even though they’re demanding your attention, they never feel broad - once you arrive, they reveal themselves as very intimate…
Absolutely, we wanted to play with the scale and space of the exhibition to afford visitors the intimacy of connection with individual works while also creating space for them to physically navigate the exhibition.
Atkins takes on a sort of physicality throughout the works, which often revolve around his own body, even if it’s digital recreation. Was the aim here to give visitors more awareness of their own presence in the space?
I guess Atkins’ presence is felt in many different ways throughout the exhibition - even in the early CGI work in the show; he depicts his own voice and body through the rudimentary performance capture of the time. He was able to animate his own figure via digital self-portraiture, which is a theme throughout his career, including the meticulous drawings of his own face. This extends to the interpretation of the whole show - the wall texts are all in his own voice, allowing the visitor to really hear him speak about his own work.
There also seems to be an emphasis on the act of creation itself; you can see the mechanism which powers the work Bed, and the show closes with behind-the-scenes photos…
And I think that’s a very important material gesture - the nature of CGI video is that there’s always an ultimate failure. It cannot truly replicate the real, so there’s a conspicuous exposure of the artifice behind all these works. It’s inherent in the pieces themselves. It felt fitting to allow visitors to see the physical, technological underbelly that powers the various works.
Some elements of the show deliberately evoke a sense of artistic revulsion - he even describes Voilà la vérité (a work in which a segment of Dimitri Kirsanoff’s 1926 film Ménilmontant is digitally colourised, smoothed and soundtracked) as sacrilegious…
Yeah, it’s really interesting in the context of this exhibition. Although the newest film in the exhibition (Nurses Come and Go, But None for Me) is Ed’s first live-action work, this obviously was live-action when it was shot. He’s used a series of AI-supported software to ‘upscale’ and re-render it, as well as working with a foley artist to generate sound that was obviously never recorded at the time. The result is this haunted video, as well as a short essay on cinema as an illusion - to take something that’s archival and transform it into something contemporary, where the addition of ‘realism’ paradoxically makes it more artificial.
Do you see these works as new technology being used to explore existing themes of personhood and identity? Or are these themes being used to interrogate the technology itself?
Ed is essentially repurposing a lot of things. On the one hand, it’s technologies, theatre, literature, video games, and performance - they’re all entangled in a sense of self. His interest is in finding the limits of these technologies, questioning where they break down and where they fail in their inability to truly represent the self. At the same time, he talks about how these CGI avatars act as surrogates for himself and afford him a space where he can explore this emotionality, his memories, and his own experiences.
Ed Atkins is showing at Tate Britain until 25 August.
There’s a deliberate discomfort to much of Ed Atkins’ work; CGI figures straight out of the uncanny valley stare straight out at their audience, moving just unnaturally enough to trigger a knee-jerk flight response. And yet, when they open their mouths to speak with Atkins’ trademark vulnerability, their imperfections become all-too-human, cumulatively building an unguarded self-portrait across Tate Britain’s major new exhibition looking back over the last fifteen years of the artist’s work. At its opening, we sat down with curator Nathan Ladd to discuss the process of putting this haunting show together.
It feels very timely to stage an exhibition based so entirely around digital works that feel uniquely personal to the artist. Was staging this exhibition a conscious response to various developing technologies?
I think a lot of people’s first awareness and understanding of Ed Atkins is as a creator of digital video. The earliest work in this show is from 2010, when he’d just left Slade School of Fine Art and was experimenting with this brand-new digital video technology, which progressed with CGI developments over time. We wanted to counterbalance that with the breadth of his practice; people may be less familiar with his drawing, his writing, his work on embroidery, and the sculptural elements of the show, including huge racks of costumes. So, while it felt important to platform video, we also wanted to showcase his work's diversity.
It’s definitely interesting to enter a digital art exhibition and be immediately met with large-scale embroidery…
Exactly - that was a very deliberate curatorial decision we worked on with Ed: what’s the first thing we want people to encounter? Actually, this starkly analogue object of old linen contains white embroidered text. It’s hard to discern, but it is actually very important because it comes from his father's diary when he was undergoing cancer treatment. It becomes a kind of foundational text later on in the new feature-length film, where the show ends.
It feels like the works play with the space itself, like mapping the elasticity of digital space onto the physical gallery space…
We were very conscious of video works in museums and the viewing experience. There’s a tradition where you would move from a single ‘black box’ space to another, encountering a film in full before moving on to the next. What we wanted to do here is treat every space as a unique material, sonic and sensorial feel, to make each room feel different, so visitors will move from a black box space to a really open gallery with a glass wall that allows you to see into the next space. It creates a porosity between the works, allowing conversation between them. So many of Atkins’ works, although they manifest themselves in different ways, reveal more layers when placed in proximity to each other.
Is this a deliberate echo of the contemporary digital world, where it feels like so many things are competing for attention?
We also didn’t want to confine any piece to its own space. These beautiful points of overlap between different sonic elements of the works are actually quite intentional. When you’re in front of a piece, you can see and hear its details quite clearly, but as you start to move between spaces, you’re pulled away by the sound of another one, calling for your attention amongst other artworks.
Even though they’re demanding your attention, they never feel broad - once you arrive, they reveal themselves as very intimate…
Absolutely, we wanted to play with the scale and space of the exhibition to afford visitors the intimacy of connection with individual works while also creating space for them to physically navigate the exhibition.
Atkins takes on a sort of physicality throughout the works, which often revolve around his own body, even if it’s digital recreation. Was the aim here to give visitors more awareness of their own presence in the space?
I guess Atkins’ presence is felt in many different ways throughout the exhibition - even in the early CGI work in the show; he depicts his own voice and body through the rudimentary performance capture of the time. He was able to animate his own figure via digital self-portraiture, which is a theme throughout his career, including the meticulous drawings of his own face. This extends to the interpretation of the whole show - the wall texts are all in his own voice, allowing the visitor to really hear him speak about his own work.
There also seems to be an emphasis on the act of creation itself; you can see the mechanism which powers the work Bed, and the show closes with behind-the-scenes photos…
And I think that’s a very important material gesture - the nature of CGI video is that there’s always an ultimate failure. It cannot truly replicate the real, so there’s a conspicuous exposure of the artifice behind all these works. It’s inherent in the pieces themselves. It felt fitting to allow visitors to see the physical, technological underbelly that powers the various works.
Some elements of the show deliberately evoke a sense of artistic revulsion - he even describes Voilà la vérité (a work in which a segment of Dimitri Kirsanoff’s 1926 film Ménilmontant is digitally colourised, smoothed and soundtracked) as sacrilegious…
Yeah, it’s really interesting in the context of this exhibition. Although the newest film in the exhibition (Nurses Come and Go, But None for Me) is Ed’s first live-action work, this obviously was live-action when it was shot. He’s used a series of AI-supported software to ‘upscale’ and re-render it, as well as working with a foley artist to generate sound that was obviously never recorded at the time. The result is this haunted video, as well as a short essay on cinema as an illusion - to take something that’s archival and transform it into something contemporary, where the addition of ‘realism’ paradoxically makes it more artificial.
Do you see these works as new technology being used to explore existing themes of personhood and identity? Or are these themes being used to interrogate the technology itself?
Ed is essentially repurposing a lot of things. On the one hand, it’s technologies, theatre, literature, video games, and performance - they’re all entangled in a sense of self. His interest is in finding the limits of these technologies, questioning where they break down and where they fail in their inability to truly represent the self. At the same time, he talks about how these CGI avatars act as surrogates for himself and afford him a space where he can explore this emotionality, his memories, and his own experiences.
Ed Atkins is showing at Tate Britain until 25 August.
There’s a deliberate discomfort to much of Ed Atkins’ work; CGI figures straight out of the uncanny valley stare straight out at their audience, moving just unnaturally enough to trigger a knee-jerk flight response. And yet, when they open their mouths to speak with Atkins’ trademark vulnerability, their imperfections become all-too-human, cumulatively building an unguarded self-portrait across Tate Britain’s major new exhibition looking back over the last fifteen years of the artist’s work. At its opening, we sat down with curator Nathan Ladd to discuss the process of putting this haunting show together.
It feels very timely to stage an exhibition based so entirely around digital works that feel uniquely personal to the artist. Was staging this exhibition a conscious response to various developing technologies?
I think a lot of people’s first awareness and understanding of Ed Atkins is as a creator of digital video. The earliest work in this show is from 2010, when he’d just left Slade School of Fine Art and was experimenting with this brand-new digital video technology, which progressed with CGI developments over time. We wanted to counterbalance that with the breadth of his practice; people may be less familiar with his drawing, his writing, his work on embroidery, and the sculptural elements of the show, including huge racks of costumes. So, while it felt important to platform video, we also wanted to showcase his work's diversity.
It’s definitely interesting to enter a digital art exhibition and be immediately met with large-scale embroidery…
Exactly - that was a very deliberate curatorial decision we worked on with Ed: what’s the first thing we want people to encounter? Actually, this starkly analogue object of old linen contains white embroidered text. It’s hard to discern, but it is actually very important because it comes from his father's diary when he was undergoing cancer treatment. It becomes a kind of foundational text later on in the new feature-length film, where the show ends.
It feels like the works play with the space itself, like mapping the elasticity of digital space onto the physical gallery space…
We were very conscious of video works in museums and the viewing experience. There’s a tradition where you would move from a single ‘black box’ space to another, encountering a film in full before moving on to the next. What we wanted to do here is treat every space as a unique material, sonic and sensorial feel, to make each room feel different, so visitors will move from a black box space to a really open gallery with a glass wall that allows you to see into the next space. It creates a porosity between the works, allowing conversation between them. So many of Atkins’ works, although they manifest themselves in different ways, reveal more layers when placed in proximity to each other.
Is this a deliberate echo of the contemporary digital world, where it feels like so many things are competing for attention?
We also didn’t want to confine any piece to its own space. These beautiful points of overlap between different sonic elements of the works are actually quite intentional. When you’re in front of a piece, you can see and hear its details quite clearly, but as you start to move between spaces, you’re pulled away by the sound of another one, calling for your attention amongst other artworks.
Even though they’re demanding your attention, they never feel broad - once you arrive, they reveal themselves as very intimate…
Absolutely, we wanted to play with the scale and space of the exhibition to afford visitors the intimacy of connection with individual works while also creating space for them to physically navigate the exhibition.
Atkins takes on a sort of physicality throughout the works, which often revolve around his own body, even if it’s digital recreation. Was the aim here to give visitors more awareness of their own presence in the space?
I guess Atkins’ presence is felt in many different ways throughout the exhibition - even in the early CGI work in the show; he depicts his own voice and body through the rudimentary performance capture of the time. He was able to animate his own figure via digital self-portraiture, which is a theme throughout his career, including the meticulous drawings of his own face. This extends to the interpretation of the whole show - the wall texts are all in his own voice, allowing the visitor to really hear him speak about his own work.
There also seems to be an emphasis on the act of creation itself; you can see the mechanism which powers the work Bed, and the show closes with behind-the-scenes photos…
And I think that’s a very important material gesture - the nature of CGI video is that there’s always an ultimate failure. It cannot truly replicate the real, so there’s a conspicuous exposure of the artifice behind all these works. It’s inherent in the pieces themselves. It felt fitting to allow visitors to see the physical, technological underbelly that powers the various works.
Some elements of the show deliberately evoke a sense of artistic revulsion - he even describes Voilà la vérité (a work in which a segment of Dimitri Kirsanoff’s 1926 film Ménilmontant is digitally colourised, smoothed and soundtracked) as sacrilegious…
Yeah, it’s really interesting in the context of this exhibition. Although the newest film in the exhibition (Nurses Come and Go, But None for Me) is Ed’s first live-action work, this obviously was live-action when it was shot. He’s used a series of AI-supported software to ‘upscale’ and re-render it, as well as working with a foley artist to generate sound that was obviously never recorded at the time. The result is this haunted video, as well as a short essay on cinema as an illusion - to take something that’s archival and transform it into something contemporary, where the addition of ‘realism’ paradoxically makes it more artificial.
Do you see these works as new technology being used to explore existing themes of personhood and identity? Or are these themes being used to interrogate the technology itself?
Ed is essentially repurposing a lot of things. On the one hand, it’s technologies, theatre, literature, video games, and performance - they’re all entangled in a sense of self. His interest is in finding the limits of these technologies, questioning where they break down and where they fail in their inability to truly represent the self. At the same time, he talks about how these CGI avatars act as surrogates for himself and afford him a space where he can explore this emotionality, his memories, and his own experiences.
Ed Atkins is showing at Tate Britain until 25 August.
There’s a deliberate discomfort to much of Ed Atkins’ work; CGI figures straight out of the uncanny valley stare straight out at their audience, moving just unnaturally enough to trigger a knee-jerk flight response. And yet, when they open their mouths to speak with Atkins’ trademark vulnerability, their imperfections become all-too-human, cumulatively building an unguarded self-portrait across Tate Britain’s major new exhibition looking back over the last fifteen years of the artist’s work. At its opening, we sat down with curator Nathan Ladd to discuss the process of putting this haunting show together.
It feels very timely to stage an exhibition based so entirely around digital works that feel uniquely personal to the artist. Was staging this exhibition a conscious response to various developing technologies?
I think a lot of people’s first awareness and understanding of Ed Atkins is as a creator of digital video. The earliest work in this show is from 2010, when he’d just left Slade School of Fine Art and was experimenting with this brand-new digital video technology, which progressed with CGI developments over time. We wanted to counterbalance that with the breadth of his practice; people may be less familiar with his drawing, his writing, his work on embroidery, and the sculptural elements of the show, including huge racks of costumes. So, while it felt important to platform video, we also wanted to showcase his work's diversity.
It’s definitely interesting to enter a digital art exhibition and be immediately met with large-scale embroidery…
Exactly - that was a very deliberate curatorial decision we worked on with Ed: what’s the first thing we want people to encounter? Actually, this starkly analogue object of old linen contains white embroidered text. It’s hard to discern, but it is actually very important because it comes from his father's diary when he was undergoing cancer treatment. It becomes a kind of foundational text later on in the new feature-length film, where the show ends.
It feels like the works play with the space itself, like mapping the elasticity of digital space onto the physical gallery space…
We were very conscious of video works in museums and the viewing experience. There’s a tradition where you would move from a single ‘black box’ space to another, encountering a film in full before moving on to the next. What we wanted to do here is treat every space as a unique material, sonic and sensorial feel, to make each room feel different, so visitors will move from a black box space to a really open gallery with a glass wall that allows you to see into the next space. It creates a porosity between the works, allowing conversation between them. So many of Atkins’ works, although they manifest themselves in different ways, reveal more layers when placed in proximity to each other.
Is this a deliberate echo of the contemporary digital world, where it feels like so many things are competing for attention?
We also didn’t want to confine any piece to its own space. These beautiful points of overlap between different sonic elements of the works are actually quite intentional. When you’re in front of a piece, you can see and hear its details quite clearly, but as you start to move between spaces, you’re pulled away by the sound of another one, calling for your attention amongst other artworks.
Even though they’re demanding your attention, they never feel broad - once you arrive, they reveal themselves as very intimate…
Absolutely, we wanted to play with the scale and space of the exhibition to afford visitors the intimacy of connection with individual works while also creating space for them to physically navigate the exhibition.
Atkins takes on a sort of physicality throughout the works, which often revolve around his own body, even if it’s digital recreation. Was the aim here to give visitors more awareness of their own presence in the space?
I guess Atkins’ presence is felt in many different ways throughout the exhibition - even in the early CGI work in the show; he depicts his own voice and body through the rudimentary performance capture of the time. He was able to animate his own figure via digital self-portraiture, which is a theme throughout his career, including the meticulous drawings of his own face. This extends to the interpretation of the whole show - the wall texts are all in his own voice, allowing the visitor to really hear him speak about his own work.
There also seems to be an emphasis on the act of creation itself; you can see the mechanism which powers the work Bed, and the show closes with behind-the-scenes photos…
And I think that’s a very important material gesture - the nature of CGI video is that there’s always an ultimate failure. It cannot truly replicate the real, so there’s a conspicuous exposure of the artifice behind all these works. It’s inherent in the pieces themselves. It felt fitting to allow visitors to see the physical, technological underbelly that powers the various works.
Some elements of the show deliberately evoke a sense of artistic revulsion - he even describes Voilà la vérité (a work in which a segment of Dimitri Kirsanoff’s 1926 film Ménilmontant is digitally colourised, smoothed and soundtracked) as sacrilegious…
Yeah, it’s really interesting in the context of this exhibition. Although the newest film in the exhibition (Nurses Come and Go, But None for Me) is Ed’s first live-action work, this obviously was live-action when it was shot. He’s used a series of AI-supported software to ‘upscale’ and re-render it, as well as working with a foley artist to generate sound that was obviously never recorded at the time. The result is this haunted video, as well as a short essay on cinema as an illusion - to take something that’s archival and transform it into something contemporary, where the addition of ‘realism’ paradoxically makes it more artificial.
Do you see these works as new technology being used to explore existing themes of personhood and identity? Or are these themes being used to interrogate the technology itself?
Ed is essentially repurposing a lot of things. On the one hand, it’s technologies, theatre, literature, video games, and performance - they’re all entangled in a sense of self. His interest is in finding the limits of these technologies, questioning where they break down and where they fail in their inability to truly represent the self. At the same time, he talks about how these CGI avatars act as surrogates for himself and afford him a space where he can explore this emotionality, his memories, and his own experiences.
Ed Atkins is showing at Tate Britain until 25 August.
.png)
.png)
.svg){kind=logo}
