Ed Atkins

Conceived by Atkins as an artist's book, the main body is a collage of imagery, text and graphical elements. Ed Atkins (Oxford, England, 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 prophecy of things to come. 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. This catalogue, edited by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev and Marianna Vecellio, accompanies the exhibition 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the book is accompanied by a scholarly timeline and an anthology that includes a selection of the artist's unpublished writings, plus critical writings by Kirsty Bell, Melissa Gronlund, Martin Herbert, Leslie Jamison, Joe Luna, Jeff Nagy, Mike Sperlinger, and Patrick Ward,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.