Filled with laughter and pain, and bodies that cry and moan, suffer and sing, Ed Atkins’ exhibition at Tate Britain is populated by the unreal and the simulated, the present and the absent, the living and the dead. We go from light to dark and back again, from room to room, and constant shifts in tempo and register, swerving from one medium to another. Along the way, we keep meeting the artist. Atkins drawn in coloured pencil, pensive in profile. Atkins as half-man, half-spider, splayed across the paper. Here’s his naked foot, drawn monstrously huge, and a hand clenching. He’s the author of his own descriptive wall texts, a collector of lists and, most pungently of all, the digitally tweaked persona who appears and reappears in the various guises of his CGI-avatar. One of which, early on in the exhibition, is swallowed by a sinkhole, along with his Ikea-filled apartment, but not before we have discovered rather too much about the state of his mind and the grim things people get up to in the privacy of their homes.
There’s so much stuff in Atkins’s art, so much weirdness and generosity, so much bleakness and humour. A curtain opens on an empty stage and things begin to fall from above. A bed, stepladders, books, cardboard boxes, an anchor on its chain, bricks, several large tuna, bones, scatter cushions, skulls. Things pile up, they bounce, they get crushed; other things twirl in freefall, freeze mid-air or swipe into digital oblivion. Even gravity has glitches. But the cartoon rain, the flashes of lightning and the fall of pixelated snow keep the action moving. As I watch, I hear a spooky voice say: “My proper name is death.”
