Alessia Arcuri | Ed Atkins - RECENT OUIJA
“[…] With his work, Atkins explores the virtuality of our contemporary visual world and its profound effect on the reality of our embodied lives. His high-definition videos and powerful sound-tracks address existential questions about how love, sex, death, and relationships are experienced in the face of digital abstraction. Atkins' video works are digital performances, as it is the artist's voice and movement animating the digital world. In these videos, as well as in his collages and drawings, Atkins is asking for the paradoxical capacity of media to let our material lives be present in a progressively dematerialized world.” Beatrix Ruf, director of the Stedelijk Museum
A late post about an exhibition I have been visiting in Amsterdam. Ed Atkins is a British artist mainly working in the digital realm, challenging this field with a totally personal approach. Through his video installation, completely made in CGI, the artist create surreal scene where the line between reality and fiction become thiner and thiner, providing the audience with a interesting yet disturbing footage. I found particularly interesting how the concept of performance art is challenged by his work: this hyper realistic animations almost let you feel as the artist is actually there in front of you but, at the same time, creating a surreal context. Within the exhibition space of Stedelijk Museum, the audience is invited to wonder within huge rooms where his works are projected in large scale, with big emphasis on sounds and voice over.
Here you can see some of his works which were also present at the exhibition and a short documentary about the artist.
https://vimeo.com/105584358
https://vimeo.com/120178711
enjoy!
Alessia
http://www.stedelijk.nl/en/exhibitions/70432