Ed Atkins at Tate Britain

2^nd April 2025

Christina Yang

Christina Yang

2 April 2025

Unfolding like a fever dream, Ed Atkins’s survey exhibition at Tate Britain is haunted by his avatars, self-portraits and uncanny animations, teetering between the intimate and the absurd. In the surreal space, Atkins is omnipresent – his image looms, his voice echoes and his words are woven into captions, canvases and screens. A triptych of self-portraits sees Atkins’s head eerily transposed onto a spider’s body, evoking a nightmarish, Kafkaesque vision. The hybrid being appears lifeless in Copenhagen #6, while in Copenhagen #5 (2023) and Copenhagen #4 (2023), Atkins’s mouth hangs open, yet his expression remains vacant, seemingly resigned to its grotesque fate – neither fully human nor entirely other. The absurdity is heightened by the work’s red-coloured pencil-on-paper rendering, which, despite Atkins’s meticulous attention to the spider’s body hair, strips it of any sense of movement, leaving it rigid and lifeless – less a creature than an abandoned shell.

This sense of eeriness culminates in Masses (2018), which further blurs the lines between reality and artifice. Comprising a sprawling array of clothing, the tangible installation from Atkins’s 2017 exhibition, Old Food, surrounds computer-generated mediaeval characters with rows of garments, trapping them in a suspended state. Sourced from the Deutsche Oper Berlin, the racks of costumes in Masses are heavy, worn and detached from their original purpose, allowing them to take on a life of their own and making the interplay between the digital and the real more tangible.

Down the hall, The Worm (2021), a computer-generated animation capturing a phone conversation between Ed Atkins and his mother during the Covid-19 lockdowns, presents an avatar of the artist that is both high-definition and disconcertingly inhuman. The dialogue is disarmingly mundane as the animation flickers between shifting close-ups of Atkins’s face, echoing angles explored in a series of three untitled pencil-on-paper self-portraits earlier in the exhibition, which Atkins writes was directly inspired by this very video. Abrupt zooms into his black lace-up Oxfords further reinforce this doubling effect as the same shoes reappear in two additional works down the hall. This doubling echoes the recursive logic of artificial intelligence, reflecting the cyclical nature of digital life, where images no longer belong to individual works but instead exist in a perpetual state of creation. Through this juxtaposition of the two existences, Ed Atkins takes viewers to a realm where the familiar and the strange constantly collide.

Christina Yang
Image: Ed Atkins, The Worm, 2021 © Ed Atkins. Courtesy of the Artist, Cabinet London, dépendance, Brussels, Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi, Berlin, and Gladstone Gallery

Ed Atkins is at Tate Britain from 2^nd April until 25^th August 2025. For further information or to book visit the exhibition’s website here.