Ed Atkins Exhibition
MOMA PS1
This event has ended.
Known for his high-definition videos that defy narrative conventions, Ed Atkins (British, b. 1982) works with filmic and text-based forms that are in technological transition. The artist considers HD technology deathlike because of its virtualized form, and he deploys the bodiless movie format to highlight the conflicting intimacies that contemporary mechanisms of cultural production represent and allow us to achieve. Unlike traditional films, which prioritize the image over the soundtrack, Atkins gives equal importance to what is seen and heard, playing visual conventions against those of sound composition and editing. Sudden transitions mark his work, drawing our attention to the artifice of contemporary “film” in its accelerating transition to new digital formats capable of remarkable kinds of simulation.
Atkins also writes prolifically, and often makes his writing available in chapbooks within the space of his exhibitions (while also publishing such texts online). In his essay Notes on HD (2011), Atkins writes, “The HD image, detailing a death of cinematic delusion, exposes the ‘reality’ of each and every subject of the camera’s gaze as deathly, as crucially deathly, brimming with death—a deathliness for the sake of representation, wherein the surrogacy of representation approaches a pinnacle of such accuracy that it no longer represents but simply is the subject.”
The exhibition—Atkins’s first solo show in the United States—features a two-channel video and surround-sound installation, Us Dead Talk Love (2012), which focuses on a dialogue between two cadavers who reflect upon representation, immanence, and narcissism. Atkins describes the work as “a tragedy of love, intimacy, incoherence and eyelashes.” Also included is a new single-channel work, Warm, Warm, Warm Spring Mouths (2013). On the occasion of the show, MoMA PS1 has published in a single volume the artist’s screenplays for the two works, which will be available for free in the galleries.
[Image: Ed Atkins "Us Dead Talk Love" (2012) Two-channel 4:3 in 16:9 HD video with 5.1 surround. Courtesy the artist; Cabinet Gallery, London; and Isabella Bortolozzi Galerie, Berlin. © 2013 Ed Atkins.]
Media
Schedule
from January 20, 2013 to April 01, 2013
Opening Reception on 2013-01-20 from 15:00 to 16:00
Depression, performance by Ed Atkins