Art review Death never far away in a weird, multifarious world of pain and humour

Filled with laughter and pain, and bodies that cry and moan, suffer and sing, Ed Atkins's exhibition at Tate Britain is populated by the unreal and the simulated, the present and the absent, the living and the dead.

- Adrian Searle

Filled with laughter and pain, and bodies that cry and moan, suffer and sing, Ed Atkins's exhibition at Tate Britain is populated by the unreal and the simulated, the present and the absent, the living and the dead. We go from light to dark and back again, from room to room, and constant shifts in tempo and register, swerving from one medium to another.

Along the way, we keep meeting the artist. Atkins drawn in coloured pencil, pensive in profile. Atkins as half-man, half-spider, splayed across the paper. He's the author of his own descriptive wall texts, a collector of lists and, most pungently of all, the digitally tweaked persona who appears and reappears in the various guises of his CGI-avatar. One of which, early on in the exhibition, is swallowed by a sinkhole, but not before we have discovered rather too much about the state of his mind and the grim things people get up to in the privacy of their homes.