ART CITIES: Copenhagen-Ed Atkins

Ed Atkins’ new video project, “Safe Conduct”, is a live-action and a Burlesque computer-generated imagery of airport security instruction videos, set to Ravel’s “Bolero”. The title conjures a parlance of specious administrative directives, an exceptional state-administered document that affords protection to the carrier, as well as the similarly named autobiography of the Russian poet, Boris Pasternak.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: National Gallery of Denmark Archive

Take off your shoes, place your belongings in the tray and empty your pockets. What happens when we unquestioningly subject to airport security regulations or other, less overt protocols in society? This is one of the questions addressed by artist Ed Atkins in his new work “Safe Conduct” comprising three huge video walls suspended from the ceiling like information displays, produced especially for National Gallery of Denmark. The main protagonist is a battered and bruised digital surrogate, an archetype animated by Ed Atkins’s own facial expressions, transferred by means of performance capture technology. Atkins takes a broad interest in such gaps between illusion and verity, between what looks and what is real. Atkins points to and takes a critical view of such collapses, which have become a typical trait of our digital reality where everything is rendered and mediated. Airport security animations not only poorly camouflage anxiety, risk and paranoia behind their cartoonish cheerfulness, they also veil the fact that we are submitting to a code of behaviour that is essentially violent and violently essentialsing. The security videos are based on loops that repeatedly tell you what to do and how to behave. Atkins lampoons such security video instructions with his work,  which at the same time becomes a metaphor for a more general state of affairs, a contemporary human condition where we are imperceptibly subjected to more or less explicit regulation, conventions and procedures, written and unwritten rules, administered by an overwhelming wealth of technologies: linguistic, ideological, digital.

Info: National Gallery of Denmark, Sølvgade 48-50, Copenhagen, Duration: 17/3-4/9/16, Days & Hours: Tue, Thu-Sun 11:00-17:00, Wed 11:00-20:00, www.smk.dk