Ed Atkins at The Tate Modern
Where Feeling Meets Fiction in a Digital Age
Ed Atkins, Hisser, 2015. Tate. Purchased 2016 © Ed Atkins. Installation view, Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria 19 January - 31 March 2019. Photograph by Markus Tretter. Courtesy of the Artist, Cabinet Gallery, London, dépendance, Brussels, Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi, Berlin, and Gladstone Gallery.
What does it mean to feel in a world increasingly shaped by the unreal? In a landmark new exhibition at Tate, British artist Ed Atkins challenges us to explore this very question. Known for his hauntingly intimate and hyper-real computer-generated films, Atkins has built a reputation as one of the most influential and boundary-pushing artists working today. This career-spanning exhibition marks a defining moment—not only in Atkins’ artistic trajectory but in how we understand the interplay between technology, identity, and emotion in contemporary art.
Ed Atkins, Untitled, 2018. © Ed Atkins Courtesy of the Artist, Cabinet Gallery, London, dépendance, Brussels, Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi, Berlin, and Gladstone Gallery.
A Career Shaped by Code and Emotion
Atkins has been at the forefront of digital art since the early 2010s, using high-definition animation to render avatars that often appear more emotionally vulnerable than the humans watching them. These characters speak in soliloquies, weep, sing, and glitch—echoes of real-world feeling flickering across the screen.
But while his videos are rooted in cutting-edge digital technology, they’re deeply human in content. Love, grief, loneliness, and longing course through his work, defying the sterile coldness often associated with CGI. This tension—between the tactile and the immaterial, the synthetic and the sincere—is where Atkins thrives.
Ed Atkins, The Worm, 2021 © Ed Atkins. Courtesy of the Artist, Cabinet Gallery, London, dépendance, Brussels, Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi, Berlin, and Gladstone Gallery.
Rewriting the Rules of the Digital Gaze
The Tate exhibition brings together 15 years of practice, including seminal moving-image works alongside lesser-seen paintings, embroideries, and drawings. Together, they create a multidimensional portrait of an artist navigating the contradictions of living, creating, and remembering in a digitised world.
By presenting both the digital and the handcrafted, Atkins collapses the false dichotomy between the two. The weightless glow of digital projection is grounded by tangible, textural materials—threads, brushstrokes, graphite—rooting his spectral figures in a world of real sensations.
Ed Atkins, Olde Food, 2017 – 18 © Ed Atkins. Installation view, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf, 2019 © Foto: Achim Kukulies, Düsseldorf.
An Archive of the Self
Atkins’ body is often a central presence in his work—not through physical performance, but through digital proxies and animated avatars that serve as stand-ins for his emotions, memories, and sometimes his very likeness. The exhibition shows how this recursive use of self becomes a form of auto-portraiture, albeit fragmented and refracted.
As Atkins notes:
“My life and my work are inextricable… Not in some factual, chronological, biographical way, but through sensations.”
Rather than mapping a linear biography, the exhibition invites visitors into an emotional archive—an experiential index of his life filtered through digital metaphors, literary tropes, and cinematic drama.
Ed Atkins, Copenhagen #6, 2023. © Ed Atkins. Courtesy: the Artist and Cabinet Gallery, London.
Between Fiction and Feeling
One of the great achievements of Atkins’ practice is the way it calls attention to the collapsing boundaries between reality, realism, and fiction. The avatars in his videos often speak with disarming honesty, only to dissolve into digital artefacts or theatrical absurdity. The effect is both jarring and poignant—forcing viewers to question not only what is real, but what it means to feel real.
This duality is at the heart of Atkins’ storytelling. Borrowing narrative devices from video games, music videos, theatre, and literature, he layers his work with cultural references that are at once familiar and estranging. These stories don’t unfold—they unravel.
Ed Atkins, The Worm, 2021 © Ed Atkins. Courtesy of the Artist, Cabinet Gallery, London, dépendance, Brussels, Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi, Berlin, and Gladstone Gallery.
A Digital World Made Flesh
While the exhibition highlights Atkins’ groundbreaking video work, it’s the presence of handmade objects—drawings, texts, and embroideries—that deepens the encounter. They speak to the labour behind the image, the emotional and material cost of conjuring a world from pixels and poetry.
The stitching of an embroidered image mirrors the rendering of a CGI model; the graphite smudge on a sketch echoes a character’s blurred digital tear. In placing these works side by side, the exhibition creates a space where analogue and digital not only coexist but converse.
Ed Atkins’ work speaks to the dissonance of modern life—lived online, yet felt in the body. In bringing the digital into dialogue with craft, memory, and sensation, this major Tate exhibition does more than showcase a leading voice in contemporary art. It challenges us to confront the emotional realities behind our increasingly virtual lives.
For anyone interested in how technology and art collide to express the inexpressible, this is an exhibition not to be missed.