Regarded as one of the UK’s most influential contemporary artists, this new exhibition at Tate Britain surveys Ed Atkins’ career to date, showcasing 15 years of work spanning computer-generated videos, animations, sculpture, installation, sound, painting and drawing.
At the heart of it is a series of 700 drawings on Post-It notes, each delicately stuck in place by its adhesive strip, arranged and framed in grids. The intimate sketches – sometimes in coloured biro, sometimes in graphite – range from messages of devotion (‘I love you x’) to surreal images, like a bird’s claw clutching a log, a giant match struck between two terrified faces and a human mouth revealing a sharp canine tooth. Created for his daughter during the 2020 Covid-19 lockdown, Atkins describes the on-going Post-It drawings as ‘the best things I’ve ever made’, and you can sense the deep affection and care that went into making them. These heart-warming works serve as emotional anchors, showing the deeply personal yet universal concerns that underlie Atkins’ broader exploration of technology and identity.
Throughout the exhibition, Atkins’ voice is unmistakable. He even writes the wall labels in the first person. In many of his video works, Atkins is represented by digital avatars in life-like renders, as visitors are guided through a landscape of CGI projections, installations of moving bed sheets, corridors of period costumes hanging on clothing racks and a muted 24-hour television broadcast of Sky News. His work feels personal – raw, emotive and laced with dark humour – and his life-like digital avatars are caught in endless loops of weeping and glitching. They seem both hyperreal, with exaggerated expressions, and lifeless, with vacant, glazed-over eyes, probing what it means to be living in an age of digital selves. Sound floods the galleries with recordings of creaking leather, rustling fabric and the wet slap of eyelids closing, creating disorienting and fragmented worlds that mirror the way we experience life itself: chaotic and unresolved.
Atkins’ voice is unmistakable – he even writes the wall labels in the first person
Scattered throughout the exhibition are detailed A4-sized self-portraits in red pencil, including Copenhagen (2023), a series in which Atkins merges his face with the body of a spider. His expression is blank and unreadable. In an age of AI-generated faces and digital avatars, what does it mean to create a self-portrait? The spider represents fear and myth, perhaps a reflection of existential anxieties of the unknown and the demise of identity in our times.
One of the most moving aspects of the exhibition is Atkins’ engagement with his father’s writing. In Route One, a faint text from Sick Notes (the diary his father, Philip, wrote during his final months following his cancer diagnosis) emerges from a large-scale embroidered textile panel. This same text reappears in Atkin’s most recent work, Nurses Come and Go, But None for Me (2024): a two hour, two-part film in which actor Toby Jones reads Sick Notes to an audience of young people. The diary is brutally honest, sometimes funny, detailing not only the physical decline of illness but the absurd bureaucracy of dying. The second part of the film reenacts The Ambulance Game, a role-play with Atkins’ daughter, where she demands surreal, magical treatments. We are transported to another world where recovery is always possible.
This survey exhibition at Tate Britain is vast, charting Atkins’ artistic development, blending emotion and personal reflection with existential inquiry. His work grapples with the nature of love and death, exploring the anxieties, absurdities, and vulnerabilities of life in an age where technology both preserves and distorts who we are. The result is something urgent and deeply human.
