Ed Atkins
Tate Britain, London
From April 2nd until August 25th, 2025
British contemporary artist best known for his video art and poetry, Ed Atkins is showing his first major UK exhibition at Tate Britain this year. For over a decade, Atkins has been making videos and animations that mark the dwindling gap between representation and embodied experience. Using his desires, experiences and body as a model, Atkins’ works misuse contemporary technologies of representation to critically reflect what they’ve done to images and our character.
opening image: Ed Atkins, The Worm, 2021 © Ed Atkins.
The exhibition, which consists of paintings, writing, embroideries and drawings alongside Atkins’ signature moving image works in a succession of large-scale installations. Troubled by melancholy, undermined by comedowns and tempered with humour, the artist’s works pit a weightless digital life against a corporal world of heft, craft, and touch. Overwhelmingly, Atkins’ works allegorise loss, intimacy, and love.
The artist says, “My life and the work I make are more or less inextricable to me. How do I convey the life-ness that made those works – my life – through the exhibition? I mean my life not in some factual, chronological, biographical way – but sensationally, to mirror both the work’s making and my own unlicensed wants. I want it so the more you see, the richer and more complex, less authored, less gettable things become.”
For further information tate.org.uk.
