^{Image courtesy of Castello di Rivoli}

Ed Atkins at Castello di Rivoli
Ed Atkins (Oxford, UK, 1982) makes videos, draws, and writes, reflexively performing the ways in which contemporary modes of representation – from bathetic poetry to computer-generated animation – attempt to do justice to powerfully emotional and embodied experience. Atkins’ work is at once a disturbing diagnosis of a digitally mediated present-day, and an absurd prophesy of things to come.

^{Image courtesy of Castello di Rivoli}

It is skeptical of the promises of technology yet suggests that it is possible to salvage subjectivity through a kind of sincere burlesque of love and hate, suspending a hysterical sentimentality within the desperate lives of the surrogates he creates. The retrospective, held in five rooms on the third floor of the Castello, unfolds as a holistic installation via an innovative arrangement of works that join images, space, sound, language and color into one seamless narrative, allowing visitors to have an immersive, hypnotic and hyper-real experience. 

^{Image courtesy of Castello di Rivoli}

The exhibition reflects on the combination of tangibility and absence found in the phantasmagoric dimension of the venue: an ancient castle “under a spell,” perhaps inhabited by ghosts, where the expression of a material intangibility seems to be exposed by artist via the reality of HD and digital culture. 

^{Image courtesy of Castello di Rivoli}

In contrast, the contemporary architecture of the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo hosts the artist’s most recent work, Safe Conduct (2016), a three-channel video-installation whose images incorporate footage of airports that show travelers the procedure to follow in order to pass security checks. In addition to the video-installation, Atkins will also present a series of new graphic works related to Safe Conduct. 

^{Image courtesy of Castello di Rivoli}

^{Image courtesy of Castello di Rivoli}

^{Image courtesy of Castello di Rivoli}

Castello di Rivoli Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Rivoli (Torino)
From September 27, 2016 to January 29, 2017

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