One of the best art shows in London is also one of the hardest to tell you about. Influential British multi-media artist Ed Atkins presents a mind-blowing series of works from the last fifteen years, now on at Tate Britain. Atkins is best known for his computer-generated videos and animations. Repurposing contemporary technologies in unexpected ways, his work traces the dwindling gap between the digital world and human feeling. He borrows techniques from cinema, video games, literature, music, and theatre to examine the relationship between reality, realism and fiction.

This exhibition features moving image works alongside writing, paintings, embroideries and drawings. The artist uses his own experiences, feelings and body as models to mediate between technology and themes of intimacy, love and loss. Together, they pit a weightless digital life against the physical world of heft, craft and touch. 

Repetition and difference act as a structural device throughout the show. Atkins splits artworks across rooms, repeats them or alters their format. He wants to induce a sense of the familiar made strange, of digression, mistake, confusion, incoherence and interruption. For him, this exhibition represents a reimagining of the messy reality of life: the more we experience, the more complex and less contained it becomes. That’s the strength of his work, the subject matter is often familiar but its presentation is both thought-provoking and confusion. You’re not supposed to get it all – even Atkins himself doesn’t always – that’s the power and nature of life. If you feel disconcerted, then the show has achieved one of its objectives.

At times it seems like there are no safe spaces in the show. Refuse.exe, from 2019, uses a video game engine to tip a stream of trash and bad weather onto a stage, and Hisser, from 2015, based on a true story, shows a naked male figure, animated by Atkins’ performance, who apologises, masturbates, and falls into a sinkhole which appears under his bed, never to be seen again. Old Food

Is a group of looping computer-generated graphics amongst racks of German opera costumes. It stages a pseudo-historic world of peasantry, bucolic landscape and eternal ruin. Look closely and all the characters weep continuously.

Loss is prevalent throughout the exhibition, in particular the loss of Atkin’s father to cancer. This culminates in a two-hour video recital of his father’s diary entries written in the months preceeding his death.

Love shines through too, in particular a collection of beautifully illustrated post-it notes made by Atkins to add to his daughter’s school lunch box each day.

Beautifully executed, the above all sounds quite random but knits together seamlessly with the other art works to be one of the most innovative art shows I’ve seen in a long time. Highly recommended.

8/10