Ed Atkins confronts death at Tate Britain

The artist is semi-present in Ed Atkins’ unnerving new show at Tate Britain (‘Ed Atkins’, 2 April – 25 August 2025). He is represented by digital avatars, his voice providing a surreal, delirious soundtrack. In Piano Work 2 (2023), the British artist’s actual form is recreated using motion capture technology as he plays Jürg Frey’s ‘Klavierstuck 2’, but the most recognisable body belongs to an everyman avatar purchased some years ago for $100, who has been used repeatedly through his videos.

‘It’s big, oppressive and slightly uncomfortable,’ Atkins says of the show, which surveys 15 years. Alongside the large-screen videos are drawings and text pieces, as well as a pair of eerie, undulating beds. One blood-red drawing features the artist’s head attached to a spider’s body.

The video screens are backed with embroideries, merging technology with handcrafting. Visitors weave through an imposing installation of previously worn opera costumes on high rails, which create a stark contrast between the physically tangible and digital, while offering a different kind of stand-in for the body. His early work saw Atkins aligned with the boom of post-internet artists, but it feels as though technology is more a means through which to explore his ideas than the main subject of his practice.

‘My work isn’t really about the digital, it’s how we see ourselves through the contemporary moment,’ he says. ‘What technologies, at any given time, whether painting, photography or writing, strain at the leash of self-representation?’ He constantly prods at the limits of existence and essence. Do our likenesses define who we are? Or our thoughts, feelings, and words. Perhaps another thing entirely. ‘No one could use this show to know who I am, but that’s also testament to the fact that even I don’t really know who I am,’ he says, reflecting on his art – and new experimental memoir Flowers – as an ‘anti-heroisation of life’.

The theme of death is ever-present. Sometimes, this is highly personal. The two-hour film Nurses Come and Go, but None for Me (2024) features actor Toby Jones reading diaries written by Atkins’ father following his cancer diagnosis. ‘A symptom in contemporary Western cultures is trying not to think about death, but then it becomes this terrible, awful shock when it does happen,’ says Atkins. His father’s diaries represent a form of processing death as it happens, and during his lifetime, these writings were available for the family to read.

‘The fantasy is that we’ll be the ones who escape death,’ says Atkins. ‘In a way, my dad’s gift in writing this diary is to share something that is very difficult but also universal.’ While works such as this reflect directly on death as a theme – Hisser (2015), a three-screen video earlier in the exhibition, was inspired by a man who disappeared when a giant sinkhole opened under his house and consumed him in bed – the medium itself is also inherently interwoven with mortality.

Atkins describes the digital avatars representing a form of death, attempting to look like or be a person but failing. They are blatantly unalive, missing a specific humanness that is difficult to recreate. ‘There are parts of being a person that can’t be taken by representational technology,’ he says. This is heightened by the melancholy that permeates the work. ‘Even if death itself is unavailable as a thing to properly feel or think about, you’re getting close to it with the sense of a loss [in the work] that you can’t name.’

This melancholy is balanced with a lightness that hasn’t been so present in previous shows. ‘There is some joy,’ Atkins tells me, reflecting on the mass of Post-It-note drawings on show that he drew for his daughter during the pandemic. While a palpable nihilism has always run through his pieces, this is countered by a new, paternal warmth. ‘The missing element’ in his works was the ‘straightforward love and joy’ that differs from the emotional ambiguity that characterises many of his pieces. ‘It’s not complicated because it’s attached to the love of my children.’

‘Ed Atkins’ is at Tate Britain, London, 2 April – 25 August 2025, tate.org.uk

Check out more new London art exhibitions to see this month