Old Food

"'Violent, emetic, immoderate, improper, impure - that's to say it's the real thing. Atkins's prose, which may not be prose, adheres to Aragon's maxim ""Don't think - write.""' - Jonathan Meades

'Atkins, reflecting on the absence of humans in the exhibition, here favours the visceral impact of associated images and words, pumping the poetry-prose with lines that speak of our primeval instincts, needs and desires, in order to ""seek empathic commons"".' - ArtReview

'Ed Atkins is the artist of ugly feelings - gruesome and smeared and depleted. But everything he does in his videos or paintings, I've always thought, he really does as a writer. He uses language as a system where everything gets reprocessed and misshapen - a unique and constant mislaying of tone that's as dizzying as it's exhilarating.' - Adam Thirlwell, author of Lurid & Cute

'The universe is a rabble of contagion and miasma. The universe is a rabble of spheres, moved by mystical forces. Ed Atkins pokes this condition. He strokes and bursts it. He is the barber who doubles as doctor and a dentist, quick with his knife and flushes of blood. No page of Old Food is dry, it seeps with life, it breathes, bleeds, engorges, sticks you together with spit. Like bacterial cells on an errant loaf, Old Food is language in growth. ' - Helen Marten, 2016 Turner Prize winner"