A reading performance
Sat 29 Feb at 15:00
Tickets 18/15e (+1e service fee at the webstore)
The ticket includes admission to Kiasma’s exhibitions on the day of the performance
Duration approx. 2h 15min.
Ed Atkins will deliver a dramatic reading of his new book Old Food, with songs and histrionics throughout. Ed will sign copies afterwards.
Old Food is a prose poem book that explores mass consumption, both physical and digital, through our relationship with food.
“Old Food slips its context with an easy felicity to become something rather strange. It would be incorrect to describe Old Food as ‘set’ anywhere, or to say it is ‘about’ anything. Technically speaking, it is a monologue to be spoken by someone who appears to be recalling how and what they ate in a more or less non-specific post-apocalyptic Britain. I can neither tell you what this book is about, nor claim to understand it.
Better for me to describe what it is like to read Old Food. It reads like a long, jumbled recollection of muck, chicken oysters, blunt knives, remembered summers and autocannibalism. It reads like a restaurant menu penned by a demented Geoffrey Hill. It is a poetic bleak comedy, in which all flesh is carrion and dinner is served, and I can’t help but admire it for its sheer insanity.”
– John Phillips, The London magazine
About the artist
Ed Atkins (b. 1982, Oxford, UK) lives and works in Copenhagen. He has displayed his work in solo exhibitions e.g. at Kunsthaus Bregenz, K21 Düsseldorf, Martin-Gropius-Bau, Stedelijk Museum, The Serpentine Gallery and MoMA PS1 as well as at the Venice Biennale; Lyon Biennial and Performa.