Tracey Emin On Art-Making, Honesty, And Survival: 'Abuse Is Everywhere'

(MENAFN- USA Art News) Tracey Emin at Tate Modern:“A Second Life” Turns Private Trauma Into a Public Reckoning

Walking into Tate Modern's“Tracey Emin: A Second Life,” the first jolt is linguistic before it is visual: appliquéd phrases that read like hard-won refusals and unanswered questions. Nearby, a 2018 painting titled“Rape_” stages a collision of forms - a frantic white mass pressing down toward a body outlined in red - that refuses the comfort of distance.

The London exhibition, previewed on February 23, 2026, gathers works that speak directly and indirectly to sexual violence, coercion, and the long afterlife of violated agency. Some pieces name the experience bluntly; others circle it, letting the body and the line carry what language cannot.

Among the works that confront the subject without euphemism is the embroidered textile“Just Like Nothing” (2009). It shows a semi-abstracted female figure, legs splayed, face obscured, with hand-sewn text at the bottom:“You made me feel like nothing.” A 2024 painting of two loosely rendered figures, tangled together in vivid red, repeats the phrase“you keep fucking me” across the top, over and over, as if the canvas itself were trapped in a loop of insistence. Elsewhere, one of Emin's signature handwritten neon works glows with a line that lands like an elegy:“I could have loved my innocence.”

Emin has long been associated with confessional candor, but she argues that the cultural frame around her work shifted in the mid 2010s. The #MeToo movement, she said, changed the way audiences understood what she had been making all along.“Previously, people just thought I was moaning and whining and sulking,” she said.“When actually I was writing about teenage sex, rape, abuse, child abuse, abortion - all issues that women and young girls face.”

In the context of the partial release of the Epstein files, Emin's insistence on the everyday pervasiveness of predation becomes a central through-line. She described a fear that the public will treat such revelations as a problem belonging to a distant class of villains.“My main problem with all of the Epstein stuff is that people will start to think that it's over there, that it's a long way away - it's the rich, it's the celebrated, it's the powerful that are doing these things. And it's not, is it?,” she said.“It doesn't matter whether they're powerful or rich or white or Black. It doesn't matter where they come from. Abuse is happening everywhere, all the time.”

That argument - that the work is not only autobiographical but also diagnostic - is echoed in the show's emotional temperature. Emin suggested she wants younger viewers,“men and women,” to leave talking about how the work maps onto their own lives.

Yet she draws a firm line between speaking plainly and making propaganda.“It's not just about women of this generation, but women of the last generation, and women of the next generation,” she said. Still, when asked about activism, she was unequivocal:“Not in the slightest, not even in the tiniest bit. I'm an artist, I make art.”

The tension between art-making and advocacy is especially charged in the galleries devoted to abortion. Emin has spoken publicly about having two abortions in the 1990s; the first nearly killed her after doctors discovered she had been pregnant with twins and one fetus had been left inside her. At Tate, works including“The Last of the Gold” (2002) return to the subject with a mix of grief, anger, and unsparing clarity.

Her position on access to care is not abstract.“There'll be women dying if abortion is outlawed,” she said.“And the fact that someone would rather their daughter die from a backstreet abortion than have a legal abortion is absolutely insane. It's common sense that I'm talking about.”

The exhibition also includes Emin's 1996 film“How it feels,” which follows her walking through London as she speaks about the pain of an abortion and the way she was treated afterward, alongside her complicated feelings about having children - shaped, she suggests, by her working-class background.

“A Second Life” does not ask to be read as a manifesto. It asks something more difficult: to sit with the evidence of what happens when private experience is made visible without being softened for public consumption. In Emin's hands, that visibility becomes less a confession than a demand for recognition - not of her alone, but of the conditions that make her story legible to so many.

Note: The source excerpt provided appears truncated in its final paragraph; additional details (including full dates and further context) were not available here.

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