[Photos] Ed Atkins stages first solo exhibition in Korea, ‘One Day in Space,’ with 40,000 images captured every minute

Ed Atkins’ ‘One Day in Space’: 40,000 images captured every minute

British contemporary artist Ed Atkins, 44, explores the weight of time’s passage and the disappearance of existence in his first solo exhibition in Korea, ‘One Day in Space’. The exhibition opened at ‘Gladstone’ in Seoul’s Hannam-dong neighborhood.

40,000 fleeting moments emerging through layers of time

The exhibition’s central work, ‘Passive Mech’, is a time-lapse video born of the artist’s relentless observation. After building a cardboard stage by hand outside his summer home, Atkins fixed a camera by the window of his daughter’s room and recorded the view at one-minute intervals, capturing more than 40,000 images.

In the video, the temporary structure quietly collapses as the seasons shift from winter toward spring. Without any dramatic event, the disintegrating stage offers a visual testament to nature’s vast cycle of creation and disappearance, growth and death.

Everyday life enters the museum and touches memory

Atkins selected images from the tens of thousands he recorded and displayed them in the exhibition after processing them through a range of printing and output methods. The stark contrast between rough-textured objects that appear shaped in a home and the precisely crafted frames characteristic of a museum is striking.

“Technology is more than a scientific domain; it is the sum of the various forms of expression conceived by language and civilization,” the artist said. “This is a process of tracing how technology transforms what we are trying to communicate.” He added, “I wanted to capture the trajectory and history of photography’s evolution into video. Photography is a powerful medium that restores emotion and makes ‘memory’ tactile,” he said.

The heavy trace of absence left by vanished bodies

The ‘Frottage’ series occupying one side of the exhibition probes persistently at the void left by existence. Atkins placed paper over bedsheets left behind after children had gone to school and rubbed graphite across the surface, faithfully capturing the shapes of the wrinkles.

The creases in the sheets are clear, but the warmth and bodies that once occupied them have evaporated. The work paradoxically evokes what has disappeared through the traces left behind. “If photography engraves a moment with light, frottage is an act of using the ‘pressure and friction’ of the hand to testify to a surface,” Atkins said, adding a philosophical reflection on the hand replacing light.

An essay in memory woven from fragmented everyday life

An ‘assemblage’ made by recombining ordinary family remnants, including cereal boxes and animal flashcards, also commands visitors’ attention. Fragments of play once consumed in the private space of the home are transplanted into the public space of the museum and elevated into weighty layers of memory. Atkins described the exhibition as “an essay that reflects on the nature of time and looks into the depths of the medium of ‘photography.’”

A global master’s perspective, on view through the end of October

Ed Atkins, who was born in Oxford, England, and is based in Copenhagen, Denmark, is an artist whose work has drawn eager attention from leading institutions around the world, including New York’s New Museum, MoMA PS1 and London’s Serpentine Galleries. He has also made his mark at major international arts events, including the Venice Biennale.

The exhibition, which breaks down the boundaries between time and memory, runs through Oct. 31 and offers visitors an opportunity to see new conversations in contemporary art firsthand.

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