The Hartwig Art Foundation and the Holland Festival present Epitaph by Ed Atkins. Epitaph shows Atkins’ attempt at an adequate recitation of the poem The Morning Roundup (1971) from the New York author Gilbert Sorrentino with singing and histrionics throughout. The performance is given a new title for every iteration.
The poem is almost completely exhausted; I throw most everything at it. The songs appear as a kind of reprieve: they interrupt the rhythm and afford some respite from the challenge of speech as something that is meant to convey significance — perhaps particularly by the profundity of poetry. The songs are generous; songs are generous. The shifts are modal in lots of ways, and maybe most significantly, they are pressure drops that are kind in some essential way. They’re songs I sing to my daughter*
The worm
During the Holland Festival 2023, the installation The worm (2021) by Ed Atkins will be exhibited in one of the former courtrooms of the Parnassusweg 220, Amsterdam.
Concept: Ed Atkins. This performance is made possible by the Holland Festival & the Hartwig Art Foundation.
* Ed Atkins, excerpt from an interview by Emma McCormick Goodhart, originally published in Flash Art as part of Special Performa 2019, 23 Nov. 2019. Courtesy Flash Art & Emma McCormick Goodhart.
Ed Atkins (UK, lives in Copenhagen) is best known for his video art and poetry. Over the past decade, he has created a complex body of work that considers the relationship between the corporeal and the digital, the ordinary and the uncanny, through high-definition computer-generated (CG) animations, theatrical environments, drawings, elliptical writings, and syncopated sound montages. In recent years, he has presented solo exhibitions at the New Museum, New York; Kunsthaus Bregenz; Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin; K21 Dusseldorf; Castello di Rivoli in Turin; Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam; Serpentine Gallery in London, Kunsthalle Zürich, and MoMA PS1 in New York, among others.