Curated by Chloe Jones and Nathan Ladd, the Ed Atkins exhibition at Tate Britain presents a major retrospective spanning the 43-year-old British artist’s 15-year career. The exhibition encompasses moving image works, drawings, paintings, writings, and embroideries. Upon entering the space, visitors encounter a wall text where Atkins poses a central question: "How do I convey the life-ness that made these works through the exhibition? Not in some factual, chronological, biographical way, but through sensations." This statement quietly sets up a tension in the viewer’s expectations: for an artist known for digital imagery, one might anticipate technical spectacle, coherent narratives, or informational completeness. Atkins intentionally employs a fragmentary, emotional, and nearly aphasic style, steering the encounter towards sensory awareness rather than logical understanding.
Renowned for his use of digital technologies, Atkins challenges the presumed gap between the virtual world and human emotion. His high-definition, meticulously constructed virtual images carry a fragility, sadness, and sense of loss drawn from personal experience, pulling viewers between the cold precision of technology and the weight of emotional resonance. From the outset, the exhibition confronts a broader contemporary question: when technology visually reproduces human feeling, does it move closer to the real, or does it expose the irretrievable absence of human emotion? This essay aims to explore how this conflict is expressed throughout the exhibition and to contemplate the state of human experience in the digital era.
One question lingered in my mind as I explored the exhibition: why was it held at Tate Britain rather than Tate Modern? After spending time in the space, I believe that the exhibition's acoustic environment and its immersive spatial design were essential factors. Throughout the exhibition, low-frequency sounds, delicate murmurs, and carefully modulated echoes were important in forming the sensory atmosphere. Achieving such subtle auditory effects would require a space equipped for controlled acoustic environments—something Tate Britain could uniquely provide.
Moreover, although Atkins employs highly sophisticated, contemporary digital technologies, the emotional core of his work is very much "British"—imbued with a distinctive sense of melancholy and existential struggle. Situating his practice within the framework of British Art, rather than the broader, often more internationalised category of Contemporary Art, emphasizes this cultural specificity. It reinforces the view that Atkins’s work, while technologically advanced, is fundamentally rooted in a particular national affective tradition.
Conflicts of Texture
One of the first striking features of the exhibition is the persistent presence of soft, imperfect materials surrounding the digital screens. Upon entering, visitors move through a dark box, facing not a screen, but a surface of stained, wrinkled, machine-embroidered patchwork stretched over the back of a monitor. Among racks of hanging second-hand costumes, short glimpses of computer-generated faces attempt to display emotions. At the center of the exhibition, a large wall composed of Post-it notes—drawings Atkins made daily for his daughter during the pandemic—carries visible marks of water damage, folding, and wear, embodying traces of bodily and temporal decay.
For an artist renowned for his work in digital media, this pronounced emphasis on material imperfection is not simply a matter of contrasting mediums. Rather, it deliberately intertwines the softness of physical remnants with the fluidity of digital imagery, creating a sensory field of tension. In this area, the viewer's body is stuck between two modes of engagement: one relying on a tactile sense of decay and temporal fragility, the other flowing through the visual smoothness of non-material virtual images. This dual experience not only undermines the stereotypical expectation of digital media as seamless and immaterial but also establishes the exhibition’s deeper undercurrent: an exploration of emotional absence, the persistence of existence, and the passage of time.
There is the idea of owning our own failures or repulsiveness in my work. Or leaning hard into them. The nuance, the fallible, the insuperable, the error, the glitch, the thing that is not about consistency or coherence. [1]
Atkins' moving visuals invite an embodied way of perception by highlighting fallibility strategically. His work's digital image, which is flawed, glitching, and emotionally excessive, elicits bodily connection from the audience, not via spectacle or identification, but through a visceral negotiation of time, affect, and failure. The spectator is not merely watching a representation; rather, they are experiencing a broken, unstable interface in which feeling comes before intellect and the limits of both technology and embodiment are revealed.
Truthfulness in the Human Body
The longer I stayed within the exhibition, the more a peculiar curiosity grew in me towards the CGI-generated characters onscreen. I spent considerable time attempting to read the emotions flickering across their almost perfectly detailed faces, only to find myself arrested at the threshold between reality and fabrication, disturbed by the uncanny effect born precisely from their technical perfection. Atkins seems very aware of this tension. He recognises that CGI, despite its technical sophistication, is ultimately a desperate, hysterical mirror—a medium through which humans frantically seek to recognise themselves, even as they lose something essential in the process.
Yet it is precisely through this fractured encounter that a strange, affective resonance emerged between the viewer and the virtual figures. In Pianowork 2 (2023), the character’s trembling, sighing, and faint, improvisatory gestures generated a sense of unstable interiority—fragile and profoundly corporeal. Standing before the screen, my body became the only stable site of perception. I could not fully "believe" the reality of the CGI figure, yet I was nevertheless drawn into an embodied negotiation with its affective traces.
A similar affective tension surfaced in The Worm (2021), another CGI-generated work. In this piece, Atkins performs as a glossy, bygone-era talk show host, smoking a cigarette while speaking on the phone with his real-life mother. Set within an ambiguous space—half theatrical stage, half private room—the work stages a profoundly intimate conversation, touching on her struggles with depression, and the father’s persistent dissatisfaction with his appearance. Here, Atkins places life itself—relationships, emotional complexity, personal fragility—into the medium of CGI. Despite the obvious artificiality of the setting and figure, the emotional force of the conversation remained strikingly real. Through the intimate, fractured, and sometimes uncomfortable texture of these personal experiences, Atkins's work summons a core human affect that transcends the medium’s virtuality.
As Mark Hansen articulates, "There would be no vision without [the body]: like the affective dimension of perception, the corporeal holds a certain priority in relation to vision" (Hansen, 2006, p. 27). Atkins's work highlights this idea with particular force: the digital moving image does not simply present a visual representation to be consumed by the eye, but calls upon the body itself to experience the slippages, instabilities, and failures of the digital. In this way, the entanglement of the virtual and the real is not a failure of technology, but the very condition through which the human experience persists.
Conclusion
Through his careful orchestration of digital imagery, sound, physical textures, and spatial environment, Ed Atkins crafts an exhibition that deliberately unsettles the boundaries between the virtual and the real. Rather than offering a seamless fusion of human emotion and technical representation, Atkins foregrounds the tension between them—the fragility of perception, the failures of representation, and the irreducible centrality of the body in mediating experience. The choice of Tate Britain, with its acoustically sensitive environment and its framing within British Art, further amplifies the melancholic and existential undertones that permeate his work. In this way, Atkins' exhibition does more than just demonstrate skill in technology or narrative coherence; it draws viewers into a sensory negotiation in which affect emerges from slippages and instability.
In an era increasingly dominated by perfected digital representations, Atkins reminds us that the truth of human experience lies not in seamless mirroring but in the broken, wavering spaces between flesh and pixels.
References
- Friend, R. (2024) 'Ed Atkins at Tate Britain: Rupert Friend interviews the artist on AI, grief and identity', AnOther Magazine, 18 April. Available at: https://www.anothermag.com/art-photography/16295/ed-atkins-tate-britain-exhibition-review-rupert-friend-interview-ai-art (Accessed: 22 April 2025).
- Hansen, M.B.N (Mark B.N. (2006) New philosophy for new media. Cambridge, Mass. ; MIT Press.
- Jones, J. (2025) 'Ed Atkins: Ghosts at Tate Britain review', The Guardian, 6 April. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2025/apr/06/ed-atkins-tate-britain-review (Accessed: 29 April 2025).
- Needham, A. (2025) 'Artist Ed Atkins on his deeply personal Tate Britain show: “It was the post-it notes that broke me”', The Guardian, 31 March. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2025/mar/31/artist-ed-atkins-tate-britain-post-it (Accessed: 29 April 2025).
