Curated by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev and Marianna Vecellio with Irene Calderoni
Turin is a fitting setting for the work of Ed Atkins. While his tragicomic videos of HD avatars express the alienation that permeates contemporary (white hetero cis-male) life, they also—like the famous Shroud of Turin before them—render the body strange, as the mutable object of endless mediations. Just as the shroud’s configuration of marks is either an ancient hoax or the indexical trace of the body of Christ, the artist’s representations may or may not register the existence of an entity that hovers somewhere between presence and ghostly evanescence—only in Atkins’s case, that radically ambiguous entity is the embodied subject of today. More than half a dozen projects will be presented at the Castello di Rivoli; notable among the works that will take up residence in the former Savoy soldier barracks are Ribbons and Happy Birthday!!!, both 2014. Another video installation, Safe Conduct, 2016, will be on display at the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo.