Low Realisms, XXIX CSAV - Artists' Research Laboratory led by Ed Atkins in Fondazione Antonio Ratti, opens its doors to the public Tuesday 22 July at 6 pm.

h 6 pm
Aperto

The 16 young international artists enrolled in Low Realisms, led by Ed Atkins through a programme of workshops, readings, viewings, discussions and performances on the less traversed, more convoluted kinds of artistic realism, will present some of their artworks during Aperto.
Being at the crossroads between exhibition and studio visit, Aperto represents a moment in which creative process and artistic research are displayed in the making, joining the discursive and procedural flux of the laboratory.

Artists: Quentin Bouard, John Boyle-Singfield, Ronnie Danaher, Beatrice Favaretto, Julie Goslinga, Cornelia Isaksson, AC Larsen, Daria Makarova, Tomás Maglione, Marcel Mrejen, Magdalena Mitterhofer, Youngjin Park, Gabriella Sacco, Maurizio Segato, Beatrice Vorster & Yasmin Vardi


h 7 pm
A conversation between Ed Atkins and Steven Zultanski

Ed Atkins and Steven Zultanski will 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.