An evening with Tracey Emin

 

“At the beginning of 1992, I left art. It was a terrible break-up: all part of my emotional suicide, when I attempted to give up everything I loved that did not love me back.” The majority of films presented in this programme come from a period when Emin was not painting, film becoming a substitute of sorts for what she loved most, and an outlet for her rage, tenderness, shame, erotic panic, and grief so unresolved it became a language of its own.

Emin grew up in Margate, a seaside town where the soundtrack was wind and slot machines. In Why I Never Became a Dancer (1995), the first film in this programme, she returns to that coastline with a voiceover whose frankness startles and moves to tears. She recounts dropping out of school at 13, drifting through cafés and arcades, drinking cider on the beach, discovering sex before knowing what to do with desire. “It didn’t matter that I was young,” she says, “there were no morals, no rules of judgement.”

She then picked up painting briefly for a show in Stockholm in 1996, but she didn’t put down the camera. "I stopped painting when I was pregnant. The smell of the oil paint and the turps made me feel physically sick, and even after my termination, I couldn’t paint. It’s like I needed to punish myself by stopping the thing I loved doing the most.” 

Her most searing film, How It Feels (1996), unfolds in the open air of London streets. Emin walks and talks, recounting an abortion she had in 1990. The sound is rough, the wind cuts across the microphone. A clean recording, she later said, “would be turgid and boring”, the disruption forces the viewer to lean in, to labour with her voice. It is not a pro-life nor a pro-choice manifesto – Emin explicitly resisted those binaries –yet the film was seized upon by anti-abortion groups, weaponised against her wishes. Seen now, especially from within countries where abortion access remains precarious or deliberately sabotaged, How It Feels stands both as personal testimony and a stark reminder of how vulnerable women’s bodies remain to political and medical appropriation. It is a tough watch, but its toughness is precisely the point: a refusal to let the individual realities of abortion be simplified, a refusal of shame, a refusal of silence.

By the late 1990s Emin’s camera became a tool for geographic as well as emotional mapping. Niagra (1997), made during a holiday with friends after a difficult breakup, pairs the brute force of the Falls with the soft structure of companionship. Shot on Super 8, the film has the texture of a diary, it is immediate and tender. It tells a story of emotional recovery understood not as a triumph but as presence.

If Niagra is about healing, Homage to Edvard Munch and All My Dead Children (1998) is about haunting. Emin lies naked in a fetal curl on a jetty outside Munch’s house in Åsgårdstrand, the site of many of his paintings. A cry – part lament, part invocation – fills the space. She has said she has been in love with Munch since she was eighteen, drawn to his unguarded portrayals of longing and despair. In this film, admiration becomes identification: two artists connected across a century, joined by their willingness to use their own pain as medium.

The turn of the millennium brought new tonalities: a kind of bruised and absurdist play. In Love Is a Strange Thing (2000), Emin approaches a bull mastiff, reciting a dialogue in which the dog propositions her for sex. It is a joke and an allegory of the entanglements she has spent her life unpicking: predator and seductress, vulnerability and agency, desire and distrust. The dog’s final accusation lands like a punch; Emin’s self-depracting wit is never detached.

The same year she travelled to Cyprus, her father’s homeland, to make Sometimes the Dress Is Worth More Money Than the Money (2000). Wearing a traditional wedding dress pinned with banknotes, Emin performs a childhood fantasy of a ceremony that never was. The film riffs on the myths families create around women’s futures. “The shopkeeper must have thought we were having a shotgun wedding,” she said. As with so much of her work, the joke veils a tender defiance.

Even when she disavowed filmmaking in the early 2000s – “I realised I hated the process; it just bored me to tears, which made me realise I am not a filmmaker” – the logic of the camera never fully left her work. The last two films presented in this programme showcase her affinity for the moving image: Those Who Suffer Love (2009), an animation based on her line drawings of a masturbating woman, and You Made Me Feel Like This (2017), a meditation on memory threatened with erasure.

Across these works, a consistent proposition emerges: survival through articulation. Rather than aestheticising pain, Emin chooses to keep living through it. Nothing is wasted: not rage, not breakups, not beachside humiliations, not the difficult truths of one’s own body. Seen together, her films express a stubborn right to feel “mighty real” in a world that prefers women small, silent, and ashamed.

 

[Aleksandra Jeglińska]