Having only just moved into the Highline Building at the end of September, the arrival of Ed Atkins in December 2017 marked the first artist’s visit for us, the ASP 4 group of Associates. To begin the evening, Ed provided a close reading of new works currently being exhibited as part of Old Food at Berlin’s Martin Gropius-Bau, a generous collection of looping videos and commissioned texts that drove a lively and extensive critical discussion. We spoke in particular about the nihilism that drives much of Ed’s work, which consequently brings about many of the distinguishing qualities of his pieces: laborious technological processes of making, his rejection of traditional narrative structures, and the thematic exploration of ‘unproductive’ states of being, such as melancholy. Ed was able to see work from all the associates, as we had held our first open studio event only days before his visit and chose to leave the space as it was. This was interspersed with focussed presentations from Realf Greville-Heygate, Madi Walsh and Tarryn Williams. The artists in question shared Ed’s interests in digital practices and experimenting with forms of representation and their relationship to perceived realities; in Realf’s case, we discussed his processes of realising hyperreal object surrogates, rendered in paint or with software; meanwhile Tarryn and Madi explored these questions of representation — with poetry readings and a sound piece respectively — through language, with a particular focus on the nonhuman protagonists found within their texts. Tarryn Williams
