"My life and the work I make are more or less inextricable to me," Ed Atkins comments in a catalogue interview for his ongoing retrospective at Tate Britain, titled Ed Atkins. While the idea that the artist's work is a mirror of his life is underscored by the title of the exhibition—curated by Nathan Ladd and Polly Staple—it is also complicated by the works on display. Within the show, visitors encounter different versions of Atkins. There are generic digital avatars intended as surrogates of the British artist, a near-identical digital double of him that plays the piano, and perhaps in the most unsettling version, several painstakingly detailed hand-sketched portraits of Atkins appear with the bodies of spiders. The show acts almost as a fun house installation of the anxieties and desires that live inside the artist's head, told through moving image works alongside writing, paintings, embroideries and drawings.

One of the largest retrospectives of the video artist's work, the exhibition spans 15 years of Atkins' career. His work borrows heavily from cinema, video games, literature, music and theatre to explore the tensions between reality and fiction, realism and representation. For an artist immersed in using art as a means of self-expression and introspection, the retrospective format may seem self-evident. Yet, the forensic manner in which Atkins examines human experience begs the question: What is the line between private and public for an artist whose work and life are interchangeable? How do we depict what is purportedly the artist’s mind? For Atkins, there are no straightforward answers. As he notes in the interview with Staple in the catalogue, "I wanted to confuse works, sully works by exposure to others, reveal recursive, inadvertent, obsessive aspects, denigrate works maybe. Elevate others. I wanted to mishandle things in a manner to reveal my hand...I want the show to lose my work so it might be found and prevailed upon anew."

And this is perhaps why the exhibition is not presented in a chronological (or seemingly even thematic) manner. As Staples observes, in the first half of the show which includes Death Mask II: The Scent (2010), Cur (2010), Hisser (2015), Refuse.exe (2019) and Old Food (2017 – 19), works follow fictional narratives, with Atkins manipulating reality and foregrounding modes of representation over story. The second half is more autobiographical, with works like The worm (2021), Pianowork 2 (2024) and Nurses Come and Go, But None for Me (2024), exploring Atkins' relationship with his family. The blurring of the dichotomies of digital and physical and the idea of repetition, difference and the loss that follows become recurring themes. Works play on loop, with infinitesimal differences between two recordings, such as in Refuse.exe (2019). In each repetition, there is a difference – and between these two, something that is lost. This loss is central to understanding Atkins' work.

For the artist, who is best known for films of stitched-together stock footage with the artist's voice filling the background, this idea of the incommensurability of digital technology to reckon with sentiment or to accurately transfer emotion is key. The very first works on display, video works from 2010, Death Mask II and Cur, highlight this through a strangely poetic rendering of the artist’s grief at losing his father (who had passed away in 2009 from cancer). As Atkins notes, "The [works] stand as exemplars of video-making from my past, but also, more constructively for the exhibition, primers for the language of my work—the sentimental space, the form, as well as a medium-specificity that is as important as the imagery itself." The works have been remastered by AI for the retrospective. "This touch, which I see as both restorative and ruinous of the works’ authenticity, is a way to tolerate the past," Atkins underscores.

In the show, Death Mask II and Cur are accompanied by an embroidered textile artwork, depicting diary entries by Atkins’ father from a journal he began after receiving a cancer diagnosis. However, Atkins chooses to present the words in the diary entries in alphabetical order, so that the meaning of the text is lost. In doing so, he provides an intimate look at his life, but still puts the viewer at a distance. The contemporary artist's use of lists foregrounds the show's obsession with a certain order and repetitive strain. As Atkins explains in the catalogue, “Their economy so outrageously obfuscates their subject. They’re such brutal, mundane, profound literature.” In this sense, Refuse.exe explores the idea of lists through a digital artwork inspired by Antonin Artaud’s writing. The work is powered by a modified version of the Unreal Engine; it morphs with every iteration of it that plays while in the show.

The ways in which representations are perhaps their own versions of reality are explored in Atkins' use of digital doubles for a large part of his oeuvre. Are these avatars as alive as our bodily selves? The worm (2021) is the rendering of a phone call between Atkins and his mother. Created through motion capture technology, a digital avatar mimics Atkins' actions while an audio of the conversation plays in the background. While the idea is to bring sentimentality to the foreground, the almost uncanny representational version of Atkins puts the viewer at a remove.

Within the show, there is a ceaseless search (and ultimate failure) to find a language that can render our innermost feelings to the world. For example, his latest work, which premiered at the exhibition, Nurses Come and Go, But None for Me (created with Steven Zultanski, 2024), sees English actor Toby Jones read from Sick Notes (the cancer diary) to an audience. When the excerpt ends, Jones and his partner in the film perform a game called the Ambulance Game. Atkins invented the game for his daughter; she would pretend to be sick and receive fictional treatment. The theatricality of the performance conjures up a fictionalised version of Atkins’ life and anxieties. In the film, the game is mimed by Jones’ partner sticking Post-It notes on him. Once the game is done, the film ends.

"The tech I use stands in for all kinds of mechanisms that clamour at the door of human experience, making failed attempts on it," Atkins elaborates in the catalogue. If the start and end of the exhibition are rendered in different ways to understand loss, grief and mourning, the heart of the show seems to present both the messiness of living and its anxieties. The central gallery space displays a series of Post-It notes, all drawn by hand. The project started with Atkins putting these drawings into his daughter's lunch box. As he describes, the small drawings are “tiny, laboured, inscrutable attempts to communicate feeling”, which were “impelled by love and devotion”.

Through different versions of himself (CGI and hand-sketched, present and absent), by focusing on the same emotions, Atkins seems to ask: Can the technology we use to speak or express ourselves feel things? What emotions 'stick' to intangible objects? This is ultimately a crucial question in the digital age, especially at a time when debates on artificial intelligence and whether it can surpass humans continue to shape discourse in the creative field. In the realisation of Atkins’ inner monologue of sorts, is a sense that art and hence creative output is as much alive as the person whose story it purports to tell.

'Ed Atkins' is on view at Tate Britain until August 25, 2025.