This is Ed Atkins's only performance piece, which is retitled each time. In it, Atkins recites Gilbert Sorrentino's poem "The Morning Roundup" (1971), interspersed with songs. "The Morning Roundup" is a poem frustrated by the finitude of all things and the promise and failure of language to provide comfort or reparation. The poem's brevity reinforces this experience, so that each time Atkins recites it, it moves further away from his failed attempt to communicate sentiment: the weather, love, the past; that which is gone forever. There is the poem and then there are songs.
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Tate Britain
Performance
A performance by Ed Atkins
Ed Atkins Pianowork 2 2023 © Ed Atkins. Courtesy: the Artist, Cabinet Gallery, London, dépendance, Brussels, Gladstone Gallery, New York and Galerie Isabella Bortolozzi, Berlin.
Witness a performance by Ed Atkins, created to coincide with the artist's major exhibition at Tate Britain
Tate Britain
Date & Time
21 May 2025 at 19.00–20.00
The end time for this event is an estimate
