COPENHAGEN.- Take off your shoes, place your belongings in the tray and empty your pockets. What happens when we unquestioningly subject to airport security regulations – or other, less overt protocols in society? This is one of the questions addressed by artist Ed Atkins in a new work produced especially for the x-rummet venue at the SMK, National Gallery of Denmark.

British artist Ed Atkins (b.1982) has enjoyed a stellar career in recent years, presenting solo shows at some of the most esteemed art institutions in the world, including Palais de Tokyo in Paris, Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, Serpentine Sackler Gallery in London and MoMA PS1 in New York. From 17 March, visitors to the SMK can experience his new work Safe Conduct in x-rummet.

Comprising three huge video walls suspended from the ceiling like information displays, Safe Conduct is a burlesque of airport security instruction videos. In this work Atkins mixes appropriated and CGI footage of the artist’s own devising, set to Ravel’s ‘Bolero’. The result is a disturbing, looping carousel of protocol, rendered bodies – both literally and metaphorically – abattoirs and metal detectors.

The main protagonist is a battered and bruised digital surrogate, an archetype animated by Atkins’s own facial expressions, transferred by means of performance capture technology. Atkins takes a broad interest in such gaps between illusion and verity, between what looks and what is real. Atkins points to and takes a critical view of such collapses, which have become a typical trait of our digital reality where everything is rendered and mediated.

Airport security animations not only poorly camouflage anxiety, risk and paranoia behind their cartoonish cheerfulness, they also veil the fact that you are submitting to a code of behaviour that is essentially violent and violently essentialsing. The security videos are based on loops that repeatedly tell you what to do, how to behave: take off your shoes, place your belongings in the tray, empty your pockets, put your arms above your head, spread your legs.

Atkins lampoons such security video instructions with Safe Conduct – which at the same time becomes a metaphor for a more general state of affairs; a contemporary human condition where we are imperceptibly subjected to more or less explicit regulation, conventions and procedures, written and unwritten rules, administered by an overwhelming wealth of technologies: linguistic, ideological, digital.