It’s rare that a living artist becomes the subject of a major show at Tate Modern, but Tracey Emin—the subject of a new, sprawling survey at the esteemed London museum—isn’t known for abiding by convention. 

“I always said I’d come down and haunt the place and re-hang things if I didn’t like it,” the artist said in a video call on the day of the show’s opening. “But I didn’t die. And to be alive and seeing this is really quite phenomenal.”

She’s not making jokes about death lightly. Emin, 62, was diagnosed with an aggressive squamous cell cancer in 2020 that required dramatic surgery and an overhaul of her lifestyle. She said she now lives in a survivor “bubble,” but that in this “second life”—aptly also the title of the Tate exhibition—she’s making more work than ever. 

“All I know is while I’m here now, I’ve got to make the most of every moment,” she said. “I’ve got to enjoy my painting, enjoy my life. I’ve got to be as bold and as honest as possible.”

Honesty has been her strong suit since she burst onto the art scene in the 1990s as part of the now-iconic Young British Artists (YBAs), equally scandalizing and enthralling the U.K. public with her radically confessional work that explored everything from sexual assault, abortion, and mental health to broader issues of class, race, and sexuality. 

Installation view of “Tracey Emin: A Second Life” at Tate Modern. Photo: Sonal Bakrania. © Tate.

“A Second Life” is an apt reflection of Emin’s unfettered approach to art making. Its 90-odd works are presented with barely any wall text or interpretation and achronologically—an atypical approach to a career survey, one fitting for Emin’s singular I-don’t-give-a-fuck style. There is no attempt at drawing temporal linearity through the themes of her work because even the artist’s earliest pieces touch on current and urgent issues. The show presents Emin’s career as one continuous confrontation with vulnerability, trauma, and survival.

Calling Out Abuse

The artist’s unapologetic and pioneering address of sexual assault and its after-effects runs through her oeuvre. Her own rape at the age of 13 is a frequent touchstone in the Tate show, including the 1999 blanket No Chance (WHAT A YEAR), one of the first textile works one encounters. Appliquéd lettering reads “At the age of 13 why the hell should I trust anyone” and “no I said no.” A 2018 painting, Rape, depicts a frenetically painted white mass bearing down on body outlined in red.

Other works may not reference the incident directly, but still confront sexual violence and loss of agency. An embroidered textile work, Just Like Nothing (2009), depicts a semi-abstracted woman’s body, her legs sprawled outward, her face obscured; the hand-sewn text at the bottom states, “You made me feel like nothing.” A 2024 painting depicting two loosely rendered figures entangled with one another, painted in a vivid red, has the words “you keep fucking me” written over and over at the top. One of Emin’s iconic hand-written neon sculptures glows: “I could have loved my innocence.”

Tracey Emin, Is This a Joke (2009). © Tracey Emin.

The #MeToo movement in the mid 2010s changed how people saw her work. “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 wake of the Epstein files’ partial release—which has so clearly underscored the pervasiveness of sexual predation in society and also how difficult it is for survivors to not only be believed but to find justice—Emin’s work doubly brims with a collective outrage in addition to her own. “It’s not just about women of this generation, but women of the last generation, and women of the next generation,” she said, impassioned, adding that she wants young people—men and women—to be looking at her work and discussing how it applies to their own lives after this show.

“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.”

Tracey Emin, I followed you to the end (2024). Courtesy of Yale Centre for British Art. © Tracey Emin.

It’s Art, Not Activism

Emin doesn’t skirt politicized topics in her work, nor is she afraid to speak out about them, but she’s adamant that her candor doesn’t equate to activism. “Not in the slightest, not even in the tiniest bit,” she said. “I’m an artist, I make art.” 

A generative tension between art-making and advocacy is most palpable in the artist’s works about an abortion and there are a pair of galleries in the Tate Modern show devoted to the topic. Emin had two abortions in the 1990s; the first nearly killed her, after it was discovered that she had been pregnant with twins and one fetus was left inside her. She has been outspoken on the need for proper medical care for women.

“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.”

Installation view of The Last of the Gold (2002), one of the many works addressing abortion in Tate Modern’s “Tracey Emin: A Second Life.” Photo: Sonal Bakrania. © Tate.

Her 1996 film, How it feels, follows her on a walk through London as she discusses not only the pain she endured having an abortion and the way she was treated for having one, but also more generally her thoughts on having children, which are complicated, in part because of her working-class background. At one point in the film, she notes that where she grew up, in the impoverished seaside town of Margate on England’s southeast coast, teen pregnancy was the norm, and it kept young women from pursuing education and opportunities. “By the time you were 17, you had one or two kids and, if you worked really hard, you got a council house or flat,” she explains in the video. (That she now runs an art school and studio program in the town to offer more education and employment opportunities may not be activism, per se, but it’s not far off.) During the exhibition preview, a woman started crying while watching the video.

Still from How it feels (1996). Courtesy the Tracey Emin Archive. © Tracey Emin. All rights reserved, DACS 2026.

In the next room, a shelf holds a hospital wristband and a small bottle of pain killers beside a display of children’s shoes. There’s also a recreation of her beer-can-and-laundry-strewn studio, in which she locked herself for three weeks in ’96 after what she calls the “emotional suicide” of her abortion experience; she destroyed all of her early paintings at that juncture, and started making work afresh.

Taken together, these works are undeniably powerful and speak to an experience that so many women have but don’t talk about. “A Second Life” will travel to a handful of international museums after Tate Modern, among them the Louisiana in Denmark later this year and the Ho-am in Seoul in 2027. There are no United States venues planned as of yet. The artist said she had been in talks with New York’s Guggenheim to stage the show there, but the museum had suggested downsizing it and Emin was concerned the abortion works would be first on the cut list, given the nation’s current political climate that has seen women’s reproductive rights repealed. 

Vulnerability as a Strength

While she may be better known for her textiles, neons, and paintings, Emin’s video works are in fact some of the most undersung, and they shine in “A Second Life.” Take, for instance, Why I Never Became A Dancer (1995), which relates the story of how Emin left school at 13 and had a lot of sex with men in their 20s throughout her early teens. When she entered a disco championship in 1978, men, some of whom she’d slept with, shouted “slag, slag, slag”—the British equivalent of “slut”—while she was dancing and she ran out of the room in tears. In the film’s final minutes, the artist identifies the men by name; it ends with her dancing, smiling, reclaiming joy. When it was first shown 30 years ago, it was dismissed as narcissistic and anti-intellectual, as was much of her work.

“The only two things I was good at was dancing and art,” Emin said. “It’s not my narcissism. I was using my voice to talk about things that happen to lots of people.”

Installation view of Why I Never Became a Dancer (1995). Photo: Yili Liu. © Tate.

Other highlights include the Turner Prize-nominated work that is now required study for art students, My Bed (1998), a self-portrait in installation form comprised of her mattress, tousled sheets, crumpled tissues, cigarettes, vodka bottles, a pregnancy test, and other detritus from a four-day breakdown after a breakup. Her bed reappears in the 2024 painting The End of Love, where a dark red mass radiates amid loosely drawn sheets, presided over by the silhouettes of her two cats, Teacup and Pancake. It’s a pained yet tender reflection of her post-cancer reality, one that has shifted the bed from a site of self-destruction to one of rehabilitation.

The artist’s latest self-portraits are just as vulnerable and striking as ever. After undergoing cancer treatment in 2020 that required the surgical removal of several internal organs, Emin now lives with a stoma bag—an experience she documents unflinchingly in a series of personal photographs. These images are displayed opposite half-nude Polaroids she took in the early 2000s, creating a stark dialogue between past and present. Installed along a long, dark corridor, the pairing underscores the exhibition’s theme of a “second life.” The passageway can even be read as a kind of birth canal, leading viewers into rooms that include more of her most recent work.

Tracey Emin with My Bed (1998) at Tate Modern. Photo: Sonal Bakrania. © Tate.

Emin said that the corridor is her favorite part of the Tate Modern installation. “It was the only bit that was my idea,” she said, smiling coyly. The show was largely organized by her studio director, Harry Weller, and marks the capstone to Maria Balshaw’s nine-year tenure as Tate director, during which time she has championed feminist, socially resonant art.

“A Second Life” is ultimately a resounding affirmation of how Emin wants to be understood—on her own terms. “Part of me thinks this show is going to be life changing and a major leap in my career and everything,” the artist said of seeing the exhibition come to fruition. “But I think it will probably be much the same as when I had my breasts reduced 15 years ago: I’ll just look happier and have less weight to carry.”

“Tracey Emin: A Second Life” is on view through August 31 at Tate Modern, Bankside, London. The exhibition will tour to the Louisiana, Humlebæk, Denmark (October 2026–April 2027); Hoam, Yongin, South Korea (June/July–November 2027); and the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia (December 2027–April 2028).