AMSTERDAM.- The Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam has announced its acquisition of three works by British artist Ed Atkins (b.1982): Ribbons (2014), Warm, Warm, Warm Spring Mouths (2013), and Cur (2010). Two of the works will be on show in the forthcoming exhibition, Recent Ouija. For his first ever solo exhibition in the Netherlands, the artist will transform the 1100-square-meter lower-level gallery in the Stedelijk’s new wing into an immersive environment of monumental video projections, soundscapes, collages, and drawings.
Beatrix Ruf, director of the Stedelijk Museum, comments, “By acquiring these three video installations by Ed Atkins, which together give a nuanced impression of Atkins’ artistic position, the Stedelijk Museum is bringing one of the most off-beat and original representatives of the digital art field into its collection. The Stedelijk is the home of new and experimental art. Like Tino Sehgal’s ‘situations’, Atkins’ digital performances represent the radical contemporary artistic positions with which the museum is keen to align itself.”
Atkins’ work reflects on the unprecedented potential of today’s digital culture and its consequences for our embodied lives. His videos show talking heads, body parts, fragments of music, and graphic text animations. In them, Atkins creates a world of illusion, in which the body is a digital fantasy, an avatar. Paradoxically, the effect is to make us acutely aware of our real-world embodiment and our life in the physical world. Atkins’ hyperreal virtual world confronts us with existential questions about mortality, love and intimate relations.
Many of Atkins’ works can be regarded as computer generated performances. The movements and singing/speaking voices of the “avatars” (the digital protagonists) are those of the artist himself. In his 2014 video installation Ribbons, which the Stedelijk has now acquired, Atkins shows a skinhead-like figure called Dave. He is a hard-drinking, chain-smoking, sentimental brute, alienated and on the way to some kind of self-destruction. With his melancholy expression and non-stop flow of talk and song, he drags the viewer ever deeper into his world, demanding empathy and violent identification. Warm, Warm, Warm Spring Mouths (2013) is composed of a looping sequence of rapidly changing images. We see a rhythmic succession of computer animations interrupted by sharp edits accompanied by piercing sound effects. The figure that links them is the same figure used subsequently in Ribbons – only this time wreathed in a great mass of luxuriant hair. The third acquisition, Cur (2010), is a strong example of Atkins’ earlier work, which focused on ideas of stock imagery and the aestheticisation of nature.
The exhibition is curated by Beatrix Ruf and Martijn van Nieuwenhuyzen.
Ed Atkins is generally regarded as one of the most influential digital artists of his generation. His work has been exhibited at a host of top venues, including Tate Britain (2011), MoMA PS1 (2013), and Kunsthalle Zürich and the Serpentine Galleries in London (2014). In the Netherlands, his work was on show in 2014 at the International Film Festival Rotterdam and as part of the Superficial Hygiene group exhibition at De Hallen, Haarlem.
