Living Through It: A Review of Tracey Emin’s A Second Life
- Daria Slikker
- 14 minutes ago
- 4 min read
A Second Life is a landmark exhibition at Tate Modern, bringing together forty years of work by Dame Tracey Emin. Spanning fourteen rooms and created in partnership with Gucci, the exhibition moves across painting, video, textiles, neon, writing, sculpture and photography to explore the female body in its most exposed and vulnerable states. It is often said that Emin’s work is unapologetically herself. Yet apology is the wrong framework entirely. What feels radical here is her refusal to edit herself at all. In an emotionally repressed British culture, that openness still feels confrontational and necessary.
The exhibition opens with an appliquéd blanket that reads like a life laid flat. Stitched with fragments of memory, it maps episodes from Emin’s childhood and her relationship with her twin brother. It functions less as a narrative and more as an accumulation, a physical record of remembering. Nearby, a series of intimate photographs includes My Future (1993-1994), a framed assemblage containing an old passport, a removed tooth with the dentist’s card, and handwritten text describing the strange relief of having years of pain extracted from her body. The work is modest in scale but emotionally precise, turning personal debris into something quietly monumental.
This sense of looking back with brutal clarity continues in My Major Retrospective II (1982-1993). Tiny photographs of Emin’s early art school paintings are mounted on stitched fabric. After an abortion in the 1990s, Emin describes experiencing what she calls emotional suicide and destroying the original works. What remains are these small images that testify to loss, rejection and hard earned knowledge. The gesture reframes destruction as a form of learning, one more rigorous than any formal education.
One of the most arresting early rooms contains the video Why I Never Became a Dancer from 1995. Emin recounts growing up in Margate, leaving school at thirteen, and finding freedom on the dance floor. Her dream of escaping Margate through disco dancing is punctured by cruelty when a group of men who she had slept with individually, publicly shame her and repeatedly call her ‘a slag’. She names them one by one, then turns to the camera and dances alone in a bare room, smiling to ‘You Make Me Feel’ by Sylvester. Although she left Margate at fifteen to study art, her connection to the town persists. After surviving cancer in 2020, she returned to establish the Tracey Emin Artist Residency, folding survival back into place.
Another room turns toward family and race, with works about holidays in Cyprus and her twin brother. These pieces were originally shown alongside My Bed in 1998, but were largely ignored at the time. The fixation on the scandal of the bed eclipsed conversations about being mixed race, revealing as much about audiences and critics as it did about the work itself. Nearby, a small television shows Emin in conversation with her mother. Their ease with one another creates an intimacy, as though the viewer has been allowed into a private domestic space without invitation.
Throughout the exhibition, appliquéd blankets reappear alongside small sculptures of bodies laid out on narrow tables and paintings that confront sexual violence, assault and trauma. The body is repeatedly fragmented, stretched, or reduced to gesture, yet it never feels abstract. These are not symbolic bodies. They are lived ones.
The emotional centre of the exhibition arrives with my favourite piece: the twenty six minute film How It Feels. Emin has described the work as an attempt to articulate the experience of abortion, particularly for women who are expected to resume normal life immediately afterwards. Filmed in 1996, the piece follows Emin as she walks through a park and around the exterior of the clinic, describing the physical and psychological pain she endured. She speaks of abortion as the best mistake of her life, a paradox that captures both loss and necessity. Her account is unsparing, tender and politically urgent, especially in light of recent rollbacks of abortion rights in several countries. The film insists that choice must exist even when the choice is devastating.
In a narrow corridor, walls of photographs face each other. On one side are recent self portraits taken on an old iPhone, showing Emin’s stoma bag and blood seeping from her body. Opposite them are images from before her bladder cancer diagnosis. The confrontation between these two lives gives weight to the exhibition’s title. This is not metaphorical rebirth – it is survival, documented without consolation.
The final rooms gather together some of Emin’s most recognisable works. Naked Photos Life Model Goes Mad I - III (1996) presents three photographs of the artist painting naked in her studio, alongside a reconstructed room that mirrors that space. A monumental bronze sculpture shows a figure touching itself, both tender and confrontational. Seeing My Bed in person is quietly shocking, not for its notoriety but for its familiarity. The curators leave it unlabelled, encouraging instinct before interpretation. The bed becomes a site of collapse, recovery and structure, a place where life pauses rather than ends.
Nearby, a bronze death mask from 2002 floats above red fabric, its closed eyes fragile and unfinished. The exhibition ends with I Watched Myself Die and Come Alive (2023), a large-scale painting depicting Emin as a reclining nude facing a shrouded figure of death. Rendered in raw reds, blacks and blues, the work collapses domestic space into surgical space, reflecting the major operations she underwent after 2020.
A Second Life is not a celebration of endurance in any sentimental sense. It is a record of what it means to keep living while refusing to sanitise pain. Emin does not ask for empathy. She demands attention, and in doing so, she leaves space for viewers to confront their own histories. The exhibition insists that feeling must come before understanding, and that survival, when honestly rendered, is already a form of truth.
5/5 ☆
The exhibition runs from the 27th of February to the 31st of August 2026. Everyone aged 16 - 25 can visit any Tate exhibition for £5 by joining Tate Collective for free.
