Tracey Emin's 'A Second Life' at the Tate Modern.
Coming to a close on August 31st at the Tate Modern, Tracey Emin’s ‘A Second Life’ was a heart-stopping, gut-wrenchingly poignant exhibition. Tracing 40 years of her career through paintings, sculptures, video, textiles, neon, and more, she explores profound feelings of passion, pain, loss, healing, and rebirth. Little needs to be said about Tracey Emin, who emerged during the Young British Artists movement, known for her raw, provocative, and autobiographical style, debatably most evident in ‘My Bed,’ featured at the Tate in ‘A Second Life,’ debatably her most famous work. For over four decades Emin has turned her own body and history into her material, grief, love, illness, desire, rendered in scrawled neon, hand-stitched tapestry and torn fabric, and brutally honest confession, she refuses to look away from herself.
Image Credit: Tate Modern 2026
Emin once wore Tracey Neuls to the launch of ‘Serpentine,’ a fragrance by The Serpentine Gallery and fashion house Commes des Garçons, her artwork plastered across the bottle itself. It was an honour to have our shoes chosen for such a moment, and it is that thread, however small, which pulled me towards discussing the brilliance that was ‘A Second Life’ here in a little blog post.
Image Credit: David M. Benett
For being as raw and devastatingly beautiful as the exhibit is, I took hardly any photos to add to this blog, instead sitting and lingering and waiting and feeling, feeling Emin’s entire soul being ripped out and embedded into canvases and tapestries and videos, you feel her hand slashing across the canvas, motifs and lines written in blood-red slashing at your own heart. Writing this small blog a couple weeks later, I’ve never had an exhibition remain so distinctly in my brain like this one has, especially considering Emin’s decision to leave much of the art without explanation, there are no walls adorned with descriptions of each piece, no narratives to anchor them in a time or place, no explanation offered to soften their edges.
Past the introductory room, you step into a pitch-black box, unseated and unanchored, while Emin’s voice narrates her teenage hunger to escape Margate over flickering vignettes of the town she grew up in. The footage is shot on Super 8, glowing gold and warm, achingly nostalgic despite the troubled subject matter Emin discusses. The juxtaposition of imagery and dialogue is jarring and effective, Emin conjures the Margate she wished for, even as she narrates, honestly and unflinchingly, the Margate that actually was. The short ends with her dancing to ‘You Make Me Feel’ by Sylvester, transforming her trauma and humiliation, which I won’t describe here, into something that briefly and defiantly resembles happiness and freedom. However I did feel a melancholy once the music cut and the film looped back to the beginning, as Emin’s experience cycles round and round again, echoed in not just her but others who have seen this and shared a same sense of sorrow and shame and trauma. Emin’s experience isn’t singular.
Image Credit: Tate Modern 2026
Next is a room dominated by a giant rollercoaster, a startling and monumental piece, a replica of the wooden rollercoaster once found at Dreamland amusement park in Margate. The artwork poignantly speaks to her anxieties surrounding the town, the rollercoaster is built from fragile-looking wood, salvaged and splintered and almost ready to collapse under the weight of Emin’s memory of the town. My partner, who I attended the exhibit with, saw it as a metaphor for the exhibit itself, which rises and falls like a rollercoaster, a slow ascent through her Margate years, through to written prints and transcripts, before plunging into the gut-wrenching culmination that is the ‘How it Feels’ film, and setting at the heart of the show on its two seminal installations, ‘Exorcism of the Last Painting I Ever Made’ and ‘My Bed.’ Although she admits it probably isn’t what Emin had in mind, I felt it to be incredibly interesting and too fitting a reading to leave out.
‘How it Feels’ was the hardest part of the exhibit for me. A twenty-two minute video shot on Hi8, it lays bare her abortion story without any comfort or softening. I won’t go into too much detail, for I feel its something you truly have to sit with yourself, but she speaks to her anger, her moral confusion, her heartbreak, and her guilt, and by the end I felt hollowed out and honestly half in the mood to walk straight back out into daylight, I felt I couldn’t take anymore. The exploration of female biology and abortion, unflinching and unsentimental, felt powerful and necessary, both for 1996 and 2026. Her instinct to connect it to psychology, tracing the pro-choice movement’s bearing on female mental health, was something intense and radical to witness, and something that feels no less urgent now. Emin’s ability to choose, and to have chosen, sits at the heart of this room, but it is still devastating, grief still enters. She states, etched onto the wall too, ‘“Oh, this is when I would have had a baby, in the autumn. This would have been its birthday.” And nothing ever changes those anniversaries for me.’’
Both seminal works have been described and dissected in incredible detail elsewhere, but it was surreal to see them both in the flesh, ‘My Bed’ especially. If you’ve ever known someone who has lived through severe mental illness, you can feel how the piece resurrects that feeling. Every object, from the empty vodka bottle to an old packet of McDonald’s barbecue sauce, renders the space with a vividness that doesn’t feel like art, more like evidence, achingly intimate and unbearably real.
Image Credit: The Saatchi Gallery
Emin’s honesty extends beyond her abortion into her experience of cancer, surgery, and disability, sitting on full display, laid bare in a dark, narrow corridor, we see its left wall lined with polaroids of her stoma and surgical journey. It’s here that Emin’s gift to normalise the taboo is on full display, taking subject matter that is frequently deemed unspeakable and simply setting it down in a dimly lit hallway, without written apology or explanation. This careful and quiet section was only briefly undone by two men behind us who jokingly discussed the photographs within the hallway.
The exhibition closes with the artist exploring her ‘Second Life.’ Life after cancer and her surgery, life after nearly seeing death. The large-scale paintings feel transcendental, spiritual, certainly larger than life, showcasing a defiant will to remain present. Emin here insists on moving forward and celebrating a life worth living despite every hardship that has been thrown at her. And yet, at the very centre of the room sits her ‘Death Mask,’ a bronze self-portrait sculpture cast from her own neck and head. The piece is beautifully displayed atop a red velvet base, playing on the historic tradition of casting death masks for famous, ‘great’ men, whilst simultaneously reminding the viewer of mortality and the inevitability of death.
Image Credit: Me at Tate Modern 2026
Ending this exhibit with a gift shop felt mildly repulsive and obscene, you could barely stand to look at the commodified fragments of art stamped onto t-shirts and posters and magnets. And yet, the shill that I am, I still walked out with a poster and a magnet, the latter bearing her work, ‘Meet Me in Heaven I Will Wait For You.’ The iconic, tear-jerkingly beautiful phrase contains a multitude of different interpretations. Within the context of the exhibit, I read it as her declaration to her unborn child. But it can be felt too as something wider, potentially seen as a declaration of love, romantic and maternal both, refusing to choose between the two. And now it sits on the radiator in my bedroom, magnetised, laminated, and thoroughly gift-shoppified, proof, if nothing else, that capitalism will find a way to sell back to you grief framed in 9x6.5cm dimensions.
It is certainly safe to say this is one of the best things I’ve ever seen at the Tate, and I would have to recommend it wholeheartedly to anyone who loves art, just prepare yourself and know that it will ask something of you in return for its beauty and vulnerability. It's been showing for a while, but there isn't long left, you have until the 31st of August at the Tate Modern on the Southbank, so please see it while you can!
Written by Jason Cassar for Tracey Neuls Online.