Death Mask II: The Scent by Ed Atkins (1982, Stonesfield, near Oxford, UK) is a haunting video work that explores death, grief, and the limits of digital representation. Blending manipulated high-definition imagery—melting candles, oozing fruit, shifting surfaces—with fractured sound, the piece creates an atmosphere of disorientation and decay. There’s no clear narrative, only a looping, glitchy sequence that evokes emotional breakdown and technological failure.
Made after the death of Atkins’s father, the work carries a personal weight. Its title evokes both permanence (death mask) and transience (scent), reflecting the tension between the physical body and its digital afterimage. Atkins has said he wanted it to “stink of rotting flesh”—a way to confront the viewer with the visceral reality of loss beneath the sleek surface of the screen. Ultimately, the work resists resolution. Its fragmentation and repetition become a metaphor for grief itself: looping, messy, unresolved. Through this, Atkins challenges how digital media tries—and fails—to represent something as profoundly human as death.
Atkins’s art combines cinematic visuals, poetic monologues, and a distinct aesthetic of fragmentation and glitch. His video installations—such as Us Dead Talk Love (2012) and Death Mask II: The Scent (2010)—frequently feature uncanny avatars delivering emotionally charged soliloquies. These works blur the boundaries between presence and absence, exploring how digital media attempts, and often fails, to replicate human feeling and physical reality. The tension between slick, hyper-real visuals and deeply personal content is central to Atkins’s practice.
Atkins’s studied at Central Saint Martins, where he completed an MA in Fine Art at the Slade School of Fine Art in 2009. Now based in Copenhagen, Atkins has also taught at institutions including Goldsmiths and the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. His work often interrogates the dissonance between digital representation and emotional reality, grappling with themes such as death, grief, intimacy, and embodiment. He has exhibited internationally at major institutions, including solo shows at Tate Britain, MoMA PS1 (New York), the Serpentine Gallery (London), Kunsthalle Zürich, Palais de Tokyo (Paris), and the New Museum (New York). In 2025, Tate Britain presented a major retrospective of his work, featuring not only his signature video installations but also intimate drawings, embroidered texts, and Post-it notes made for his daughter during the pandemic.
Death Mask II: The Scent was included in an international moving image programme curated by Keith Whittle and Margherita Gramegna working with Film London
