Two unmade single beds are moving restlessly. They appear half-alive, as if the white sheets, duvets, and pillows have assumed the rhythm of the bodies that last lay there. The mechanism causing the beds to twist and turn is not visible to the naked eye. Originally props for the play Sorcerer (2022), which Ed Atkins co-wrote and directed with poet Steven Zultanski, they now constitute the artwork Beds (2025). The piece gestures towards a theme that runs throughout the British artist’s first retrospective at Tate Britain: the search for traces of life in non-human structures.
Atkins is best known for his computer-generated animations which, as expected, dominate the exhibition. The video works are shown alongside a series of textiles bearing dubious stains and spills, as well as endless lists – often appearing in combination. Two well-known lists from literary history serve as the starting point for Atkins’s list-based artworks: the playwright and director Antonin Artaud’s notes from a psychiatric ward, and the Japanese poet and courtier Sei Shōnagon’s list of squalid things from the year 1,000. Both have been extended using ChatGPT 3, with absurd and grotesque results.
Untitled Samplers (2021) is a three-metre-wide patchwork of linen cut to a 16:9 aspect ratio and stretched over a wooden frame layered with acoustic foam. Cryptic inscriptions are machine-embroidered onto the fabric. These turn out to be text fragments from the diary kept by Atkins’s father, Philip, on his deathbed. Reassembled as an alphabetically sorted list, the diary has been transformed into unrecognisable “nonsense.” We know this because the artist introduces each room and work in his own words. Atkins declares that where his videos “project,” his embroideries “absorb” – they impose silence upon us. Untitled Samplers appears both silent and elusive, an impression that is, to some extent, punctured by the wall text, which reveals the loss hidden within the pattern.
When an actor breaks character during a scene, it’s known as “corpsing.” Atkins strives for all his artworks to corpse, an approach that works best when it happens unexpectedly. Cur (2010), Atkins’s very first video work, demonstrates his undeniable talent for editing. And yet, not much really happens. The camera zooms in and out on everyday objects and motifs: fruit, mountains, clouds, a dog. Opaque segments dissolve into clear fragments that seduce and disturb before vanishing again. Conscious of its own construction and the emotional responses it elicits – an effect produced through Atkins’s various estrangement techniques – the video also draws us into its artificial nature. It corpses elegantly.
By 2015, Atkins’s signature computer-generated style was fully developed. In Hisser (2015), we encounter a man with a ravaged face – sun damage and pigment spots included. The stock figure, purchased by Atkins from a 3D model marketplace, is animated using the artist’s own facial expressions and voice, which have been recorded and transferred via motion capture technology. The video is projected onto three thick freestanding screens of slightly different sizes, placed one behind the other. The man carries out mundane activities in a bedroom – including masturbating with his back to the ‘camera’ – before the floor opens beneath him and he disappears into a sinkhole. In refuse.exe and Untitled (both 2018), falling is also central: rubbish, glass, rubbery bodies, books, sauce, and salad plummet downwards in an apparently endless stream of CGI pixels.
Atkins’s method involves adopting technological tools as they become available on the market, often in their early, glitch-prone iterations. As a result, the videos have a distinct air of newness when first encountered – an effect I note fades over time. After a decade of working in this way, Atkins understandably appears to have been starved of materiality, and in 2020, he began to draw. A series of self-portraits rendered in red pencil on pink and beige paper – with and without spiders – alongside drawings of feet, hands, and, once again, an unmade bed (where most of us corpse each night), appears between the videos and textiles. The installation Old Food (2025) comprises a massive clothes rack stretching from floor to ceiling, designed as corridors. The rack is filled with opera costumes from Deutsche Oper Berlin, and nestled among them are three flat screens showing videos from 2017. In Good Baby, Good Boy, and Good Man, we encounter three medieval figures, their lived-in, greyish-white skin overflowing with thick tears.
In Pianowork (2023) Atkins has overcome his self-declared body dysmorphia and modelled the video’s digital avatar on himself. Seated at a piano, the Atkins figure performs Jürg Frey’s minimalist piece Klavierstück 2 (2001). That is to say, he presses the same key repeatedly while the avatar visibly struggles to translate Atkins’s facial expressions. One room is dedicated to a series of rainbow-coloured sticky note drawings the artist made for his daughter during the Covid pandemic, but which, according to the wall text, he later realised meant more to him than to her. His father’s diary reappears in a film from this year, Nurses come and go, but none for me, also a collaboration with Zultanski. This time, the emotional weight of the material is no longer repressed. A middle-aged man (played by actor Toby Jones) reads Philip Atkins’s sober notes from palliative care while the camera slowly pans across the faces of a multi-ethnic audience in various states of composure and uncontrolled sobbing.
Atkins’s later work reveals a more pronounced vulnerability, with the artist’s biographical self becoming increasingly visible. You might argue that we’re witnessing what artist David Conroy once called “alpha vulnerability,” a phrase that, in the context of AI, denotes security flaws in image recognition systems, but which I understand, in this case, as a form of male vulnerability that challenges traditional masculine stereotypes while also recentring the male subject. The latter is, in many ways, a sign of the times: 2025 appears to mark the return of the (white) man.
Although the pathos of Atkins’s later works invites it, I didn’t leave the exhibition feeling raw. (By contrast, Donald Rodney’s exhibition Visceral Canker, currently on view at Whitechapel Gallery in London – which includes the computer-operated wheelchair Psalms [1997] and the data-generated video Autoicon [1997–2000], created according to instructions from the then recently deceased artist, who suffered from a rare blood disorder – still comes across as quietly crushing.) There are, however, exceptions: the inscrutable video The Worm (2021), whose soundtrack consists of a phone call between Atkins and his mother, Rosemary; and Beds, where it remains unclear whether the endlessly twitching, human-like movements of the beds evoke something meaningless, or the only thing that matters.
