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Ed Atkins, Ribbons

Adrian Duncan
Eyeline 83
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Ed Atkins’s Ribbons at Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi comprised three looping video works shown in three different rooms. All works employed Atkins’s now trademark pared back, grimey CGI–animation–style. Each work was projected onto a large, white, timber screen propped against a wall in each of the spaces, with four speakers for each piece, creating an immersive visual and aural experience. 

All the works featured a white, male character in his late twenties, with cropped hair and an English accent. Most usually undressed, the figure crouched uncomfortably beneath a small circular table, clutching the single, tubular table leg; or he was sitting at a table in a bar, surrounded by empty pint glasses, smoking; or he was standing behind a wall looking, or sticking parts of his body (fingers, nose, penis), out of a glory hole in the wall. In each place he ‘looks to camera’, making observations about his situation that make little to no sense — some observations are interrupted before he can finish his sentences. The language employed throughout is so empty (or so full) of meaning that it is difficult to discern what this character means.

Each video work seemed at first extremely scattered, non-narrative, hyperactive, and highly sleazy/sexualised; the central figure appears and disappears, he sings, he pours fluids into whiskey glasses, he turns empty whiskey glasses upside down, he hides, he calmly makes claims (often accompanied with subtitles), he responds to sounds and music in his world, he is a talking head interview, he is a pole dancer, a philosopher, he is a depressed alcoholic…

Pithy comments appear in bombastic TV game show–style fonts. A paper plane flies into sight and unfolds itself to reveal the

Ed Atkins, Ribbons, 2014.

Ed Atkins, Ribbons, 2014. Three channel 4:3in 16:9 HD video with three 4.1 channel surround soundtracks. Duration 13min 19sec. Installation views Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi, Berlin. Courtesy the artist, Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi, Berlin and Cabinet London. Photograph Nick Ash.