This might hurt: Ed Atkins at Tate Britain

About halfway through Ed Atkins’ video piece Hisser (2015) a giant sinkhole opens up and swallows the protagonist. This happens shortly after the character has been shown wanking in the corner of his bedroom. And since the work consists of the same action across three separate screens, it’s triple the wanks and triple the sinkholes. What a way to go! Atkins, who is primarily known for his work in digital art (but he does so much more) has just opened a huge mid-career retrospective at Tate Britain. Hisser is shown near the beginning of the exhibition: its CGI graphics reminded me of Grand Theft Auto, and as I stood there watching the piece unfold I was half expecting there to be a carjacking. Someone I knew rocked up next to me and we said hello. He asked me if I liked Atkins’ work. I mean… I guess I do.

I liked the installation Beds (2025), which consisted of empty mattresses that seemed to breathe in and out, as if some ghosts were crashing out on them after haunting the show’s private view, which had taken place the night before. I loved the installation Olde Food (2016-2017). I saw the huge body of work years ago at Cabinet Gallery, but it looked better here in the Tate — more cramped and claustrophobic. I just wish the lights had been dimmer. Atkins describes Olde Food as “the beginning of a deliberate impoverishment in my work.” Rails of period-piece theatrical costumes (sourced from a Berlin opera house) create a set of menacing corridors in the space, interspersed with LED screens, many of which show miserable looking medieval characters weeping, snot running down their noses. A cluster of skeletons dangle from one of the rails, gazing down at visitors. It’s like Disney Pixar meets the staff room at the London Dungeon. I get it, the Middle Ages weren’t easy, but were these digital characters crying because their crops had failed? Perhaps their families had been wiped out by the bubonic plague, or they’d simply realised that their existence was nothing more than that of an NPC in a video game landscape.

2025 isn’t easy either — something I was reminded of by another work called Sky News (2016) that played rolling coverage (with the sound muted) of PMQs. Even in the darkest recesses of a Tate Britain show, I was still being bombarded with updates on Trump’s tariffs. Atkins was offering us a period of escapism before ruining it with a lethal dose of current affairs.

The vibe of Atkins’ earlier work reminded me of a certain kind of guy you’d come across at art school in the late 2000s: tech wiz kids whose studios were their MacBook pros. They could kick your arse at a game of Halo and talked about Post-Internet Art when drunk at house parties. Atkins is currently based in Copenhagen, and more recently his projects have centred around his family, sometimes as a collaboration (“Ed Atkins and His Mum Are Starring in a Museum Show” reads a recent New York Times headline), and at other times as primary source material. Some of this work has mixed results. A case in point being the final part of the show: a huge cinema style room, filled with around twenty sofas – most of them empty on my visit – where the pièce de résistance is an epic, two-hour production called Nurses Come and Go, But None For Me (2024). Consisting of two parts, the first centres around the cancer diary that the artist’s late father kept throughout the final six months of his life. The second part is inspired by a role playing game Atkins devised with his daughter where she “feigns illness and demands a series of fantastical medical treatments”. I’m not sure how many visitors will sit through the whole thing (unless you’re the art critic Adrian Searle, who bragged in his five star review that he’d been at the show for “hours and hours”), especially since the exhibition is so huge that it already requires an absolute minimum of 90 minutes to get to this point. I must confess I only lasted 15 minutes viewing Nurses, so maybe my critique here is invalid, but it just didn’t do it for me. It had the aesthetic of a well-meaning but flawed Film4 production. The first set-up consists of national treasure Toby Jones reading excerpts from the diary, or ‘sick notes’ as they are called, to a group of young people who looked like RADA graduates. The camera pans around to pick up on their emotive reactions to what they were hearing. Maybe this is harsh, but the piece reminded me of the current Cadbury Dairy Milk ‘Generosity Campaign’, in which a man with dementia fondly discusses his daughter to a woman, unaware that she is his daughter. I was half expecting Toby Jones to pass around a box of Milk Tray whilst a narrator says, “there’s a glass and a half in everyone.” This is a shame because his Dad’s sick notes mix genuine humour with pathos and are worthy of our attention: “All that saline/glucose has given me swollen ankles, feet and legs below the knee, taut as sausages”. I would have loved to experience them with a much simpler delivery: a dark room and a set of headphones would have been perfect. Sometimes less really is more.

I think a problem with video art (especially when it has a decent budget) is that it can often come across like content produced by a creative advertising agency. It’s not surprising that these same agencies seem to ‘borrow’ ideas from artists. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve seen the concept from Gillian Wearing’s 10-16 (where adult actors lip sync words spoken by children) used in TV ads. Meanwhile, artists such as Steve McQueen have literally progressed from making video art in galleries to directing feature films produced by Film4. Is this what Ed Atkins has in mind?

Throughout the Covid years, Atkins produced little drawings on coloured Post-it notes, slipping them into his daughter’s lunchbox. He says he did this as a way to keep producing art in a time when all his major projects had been cancelled or put on hold, but it’s also a loving and tender way for an artist to engage with his own child. Hundreds of them adorn the walls of the Tate: a technicolour dream coat of doodles and cartoons. One of them features a close up profile of a face with multiple noses and another with what looks like armpit hair. There’s a fork-impaled sausage, and a woman with sunglasses and a windswept bob who might be Anna Wintour, and one drawing that simply says “5 Days to Go”. They’re goofy and fun and genuinely fantastic, a major entry into the history of drawing. I also think they’ll strike a chord with the people who’ll see this show, in the same way that Mike Kelley’s manky plush toys and photos from Peter Hujar’s recent Raven Row survey kept popping up on my Instagram stories these past six months. What all these works have in common is a messy, low budget IRL intimacy that I think audiences are currently craving. Note to curators: less tech and AI please, more family photos and thrift store junk. Never before had I been so jealous of someone else’s lunch as I stood there staring at the drawings, my belly starting to rumble. Afterwards, as I sat eating a plate of grub at the nearby Regency Cafe, I really wished the chef had slipped an Atkins-style doodle underneath my pasty and chips.