From 2 April – 25 August 2025, Tate Britain showcases the first UK survey exhibition of multimedia artist Ed Atkins, best known for his ultra-high definition computer-generated videos examining the relationship between the digital world and human emotions, often focused on themes of intimacy, loss, and identity. In many of his works, Atkins includes unsettling hyper-realistic digital avatars. He buys them pre-built and then uses facial recognition software to animate the virtual characters.
The exhibition features a wide range of work spanning 15 years of his creative career during which he often used components from cinema, video games, literature, painting, music and theatre to highlight the messiness of life. He uses his own experiences, feelings and body as models to mediate between technology and themes of intimacy, love and loss.
Besides his earlier video works, the exhibition also features Refuse.exe (2019), which depicts a range of objects—such as a piano, bricks, and fish—falling in real time from one screen to the next, powered by Unreal Engine, a tool used by video game designers.
Many of the videos also include performances of the artist, as recorded using performance capture technologies. For example, The Worm from 2021, features an animated TV staging of a phone call between Atkins and his mother, while Pianowork 2 from 2024 has an extremely accurate digital double of the artist performing a minimalist piano piece.
Loss is a recurrent theme in the exhibition reflecting the artist's own experiences. The death of his father, and his daughter’s roleplaying of fantastical sickness, form the basis of a new feature-length film made in collaboration with the poet Steven Zultanski, which premieres in the exhibition.
The exhibition is structured in a non-chronological way : 'My life and my work are inextricable. How do I convey the life-ness that made these works – my life-ness – through the exhibition? Not in some factual, chronological, biographical way, but through sensations. I want it so the more you see, the richer, more complex, less authored, less gettable things become.'
