ED ATKINS IN CONVERSATION WITH NICOLAS VAMVOUKLIS

Ed, you are best known for your works featuring computer-generated avatars as protagonists. What drove you to use this technology at the height of contemporary image-making and management?

I’ve been making that work for a long while now. It was in 2011 when I first used a digital surrogate. The context shifts the sensation of the work, of course, but beneath the overt contemporaneity/datedness, the works have always centered on the use of conspicuous artifice to speak about otherwise unavailable sensations. Novelty of tech affords a certain resistibility as regards access to subject matter — or it makes the work ineluctably reflexive regarding its medium. I find structural exposure moving, I suppose, and my use of a medium is almost always in allegorical relation to a life, embodied and figured.

Throughout your oeuvre, you present the (human) body in isolation as a vessel of existential, social, and ideological struggle. Yet, at the same time, you imply that it is also a source of creativity. What is your idea of intimacy?

I don’t quite understand the question, but perhaps one way in which the videos I make attempt to affect the viewer is by presumptuous intimacy. Being too close, thinking too much of themselves, confusing themselves with people, assuming a relation that’s perhaps inappropriate for something so heretically fake.

I remember reading in an interview you had with Hans Ulrich Obrist how your video works are often derived from your writing. Could you tell me more about this creative process?

I think that’s an old interview, but the fundament of writing remains, even if any idea of scripting is disappearing. Writing is the thing I like doing the most, so it’s the first thing I do. It’s the most expedient thing, too. Thinking through writing. And the rhythms of writing tend to form the structure of the videos. At least, they did a while ago. I’m leaning toward unscripted forms these days. Far less written, if at all. This isn’t to say that writing isn’t still key to their inception, but its overt presence has receded somewhat.

Let’s talk about your new show at dépendance in Brussels. I’m particularly struck by this untitled paperwork where you have used red crayon. Correct me if I’m wrong, but is it a self-portrait…? 

Yes, it is. First time for that.

The exhibition brings together an impressive selection of paintings and drawings. In which ways do these works relate to each other?

It’s two bodies of work, really: self-portraits in red crayon on yellow legal paper and large ink paintings of mattresses on paper. I think their relation is pretty conspicuous and not really something I need to outline. It’s a very, very simple show, conceptually simple, even if in the context of my own oeuvre, it feels timely and poignant. To me, at least.

I would love your collaboration for the next one — If I had to interview one artist, a friend of yours, for an upcoming issue of the FEATURES series, who would that be and why?

Errm… I’ll have to think about that…

• ALLA INTERVIEWS

PHOTO CREDITS

Ed Atkins, Untitled, 2023
Coloured pencil on paper, framed
26 x 34,6 x 2,5 cm (framed)
Courtesy of the artist and dépendance, Brussels
Photo: Alice Pallot

Ed Atkins, Old Food, 2017-19
Video loops with sounds, racks of costumes from Teatro Regio Torino, texts by Contemporary Art Writing Daily
58th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, May You Live In Interesting Times
Courtesy of La Biennale di Venezia; the artist; Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi, Berlin; Cabinet Gallery, London; Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, New York, Rome; and dépendance, Brussels
Photo: Roberto Marossi

Ed Atkins, Get Life/Love’s Work, 2021
Exhibition view: New Museum, New York
Photo: Dario Lasagni

Ed Atkins, Untitled, 2023
Coloured pencil on paper, framed
34,6 x 26 x 2,5 cm (framed)
Courtesy of the artist and dépendance, Brussels
Photo: Alice Pallot

Ed Atkins, Untitled, 2023
Coloured pencil on paper, framed
34,6 x 26 x 2,5 cm (framed)
Courtesy of the artist and dépendance, Brussels
Photo: Alice Pallot

Ed Atkins, Untitled, 2023
Ink, bleach and coloured pencil on paper, framed
124,6 x 188,6 x 6 cm (framed)
Courtesy of the artist and dépendance, Brussels
Photo: Alice Pallot