Conceived by Atkins as an artist’s book, the main body is a collage of imagery, text, and graphical elements. Ed Atkins makes videos, draws, and writes, reflexively performing the ways in which contemporary modes of representation attempt to do justice to powerfully emotional experience. Atkins’ work is at once a disturbing diagnosis of a digitally mediated present day and an absurd prophecy of things to come. It is skeptical of the promises of technology yet suggests that it is possible to salvage subjectivity, suspending a hysterical sentimentality within the desperate lives of the surrogates he creates.
This catalog accompanies the exhibition that is developed as a collaboration between Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea and Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo. With new essays by the editors and by Irene Calderoni and Chiara Vecchiarelli, the book is accompanied by a scholarly timeline and an anthology that includes a selection of the artist’s unpublished writings, plus critical writings by Kirsty Bell, Melissa Gronlund, Martin Herbert, Leslie Jamison, Joe Luna, Jeff Nagy, Mike Sperlinger, and Patrick Ward, together with interviews by Katie Guggenheim, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Beatrix Ruf, and Richard Whitby.