Ed Atkins and Steven Zultanski held a public talk about their collaborations and their notion of ‘counterintuitive realism’.

In 2022, they wrote and directed the play Sorcerer together. In it, three friends hang out and share a long and unremarkable conversation about getting dressed, headaches, ticks, compression fantasies, surgery, and personal aspirations, among other things. When two of the friends go home for the night, the remaining one watches TV, dances, and takes apart his face in front of a giant mirror. Born from recordings of conversations among friends, Sorcerer was realised as a play, a film and a book.

Their latest project, the feature-length film Nurses come and go, but none for me (2025), premiered on the occasion of Atkins’s solo show at Tate Britain, which runs until August 25. The first part of the film is a performative reading of Atkins’ father’s death diary. He was diagnosed with cancer in 2009 and died six months later. The second part is a reenactment of a role-playing game Atkins plays with his daughter, called The Ambulance Game. Both the diary and the game were originally private creations, not subject to public consumption, though their existence and their ameliorative effects presume the fantasy of an audience. In Nurses come and go, but none for me, the camera attends to the audience as much as to the performers. The audience functions as a silent chorus.