Tracey Emin: A Second Life
Image Credit: Yili Liu via Tate
‘I can’t hear myself; it’s all mixed up’ – the words Dame Tracey Emin speaks directly into the camera, in a short film detailing her harrowing abortion experience, that plays mid-way through her latest landmark exhibition at the Tate Modern.
As I walk through the gallery, however, I am struck by the artist’s ability to transform a life of bewildering suffering and turmoil into a lucidly powerful expression of her pain. Tracing back forty extraordinary years of practice through the spectrum of sculpture, painting, textile, photography, and film, Tracey Emin: A Second Life is the largest and most significant retrospective of the artist’s life’s work. Simmering with emotional intensity, vulnerability and perseverance, the exhibition feels like you’ve walked in on something you ought not to have seen, but are so glad you did.
At the core of the retrospective lies Emin’s most seminal works, ‘My Bed’ and ‘Exorcism of the Last Painting I Ever Made’, which stand almost akin to religious relics for those who never saw the original displays, derived from a personal mythology that has shaped the landscape of contemporary British art.
Gracefully curated by Maria Balshaw (director of the Tate), the exhibition portrays Emin at her most vulnerable – both physically and physiologically. Particularly arresting is the corridor containing a series of intimate polaroid photographs juxtaposing a series of ‘sexy’ self-portraits against images documenting her life post-cancer and surgery. Since undergoing major surgery, Emin now lives with a stoma bag; the gory, bloody polaroids offer an impressive dispelling of the stigma of living with a hidden disability. Despite Emin now living at her, physically, weakeast, this exhibition reveals an artist operating at the height of her expressive force: a bold refusal to be beaten down into silence by abuse, shame, or illness.
Anyone observing Emin’s art would be struck by its intense personality; the specificity – names, dates, lovers, words - resonates with a universal sense of female suffering. Emin’s harrowing short film, ‘Why I Never Became a Dancer’, detailing her childhood sexual abuse with older men in her hometown of Margate, ends with a rejoiceful clip of her dancing to the disco anthem ‘(You Make Me Feel) Mighty Real’. Emin’s intrinsic expression of her physicality in the film is inseparable from her physical mediums; Harry Weller, Creative Director of the Tracey Emin Foundation’s TKE Studios, describes Emin’s creative process as a ‘spiritual and physical process’, noting how she uses grand, explosive gestures and dynamic movement when wielding a paintbrush, and her canvases bear the residue of that movement.
Captivating British audiences since the 1990s, Emin’s work invites you to sit in the depths of hell with her, but she also makes sure to hold your hand through it, as evidenced in her piece ‘The Last of the Gold’ where she advises abortion patients with 26 of her own rules, based off her personal experiences. Her philanthropy is also reflected in her meaningful homecoming to Margate, where she has established the Tracey Emin Foundation that aims to advance public education in the visual arts.
Experiencing her work as someone part of a generation that didn’t grow up with her feels less like a retrospective encounter than a delayed reckoning with an artist who has been shaping the cultural conversation all along. One thing is evident: despite the heavy criticism and backlash she faced as an upcoming artist, it is not Emin who has things mixed up, but perhaps those who scandalised her work. What was once considered shameful now reads as prophecy.
Tracey Emin: A Second Life runs from 27th February-31st August, presented by the Eyal Ofer Galleries, in partnership with Gucci.