What Comes After Disintegration?

It is hard to know what to make of the series of ink-and-gouache drawings that accompany the British artist Ed Atkins’s video installation The Worm (2020), presented in the exhibition Get Life/Love’s Work (2021) at the New Museum in New York, but in them is something intimate and fleshy even in the absence of a body. On white sheets and pillowcases, the afterlife of our odours, hair, saliva, and skin are pressed into the cotton fibres on which we once slept, now yellowed and crumpled. We sleep, we shed. What remains are the traces of ourselves released in our slumber, the detritus of an organism prone to decay, stains of what once was.