Exhibitions

Take a deep, long breath before heading into this year’s Berlin Biennale, because it is heavy.
The six-venue exhibition, which opens to the public June 11, offers little reprieve from the weight of the world. Instead, the show, titled “Still Present,” has an unrelenting focus on the destruction wrought by colonialism, patriarchy, and capitalism.
During a rainy press preview day on Thursday, the show’s curator, French-Algerian artist Kader Attia, spoke at length about the urgency of art, which makes “the invisible visible.” Together with his curatorial team, seventy artists, including Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Omer Fast, and Uriel Orlow, have been invited to show across six venues, one of which is the Stasi headquarters, the central office of former East Germany’s secret service.
Curator and artistic team of the 12th Berlin Biennale (from left to right Ana Teixeira Pinto, Noam Segal, Kader Attia, Đỗ Tường Linh, Rasha Salti, Marie Helene Pereira). Photo: Silke Briel
The show starts off at Akademie der Kunste’s Tiergarten location with a boxed-away assortment of plants in a steamy greenhouse. The work, by Sammy Baloji of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, critiques the imperialist motivation to collector the world; beside it, there is an adjoining audio recording from the early 20th century made by the state-funded Royal Prussian Phonographic Commission, which sought to index sounds made by African prisoners at the time.
Next to it is a work by the Chinese, Paris-based filmmaker Wang Yuyan that depicts a 2018 Chinese initiative to launch three fake moons into orbit to offer continuous light in order to keep society more productive.
Sammy Baloij, Installation view, 12. Berlin Biennale, Akademie der Künste, Hanseatenweg, 11.6.–18.9.2022. Photo: dotgain.info. Sammy Baloji, … and to those North Sea waves whispering sunken stories (II), (2021).
The tack of the exhibition, which triangulates post-colonialism and capitalist criticism, is not surprising given Attia’s CV. In Paris, he founded a now-closed arts space called La Colonie that hosted community talks and events focused on racism and colonialism. The Berlin-based artist, who is represented by a slew of international galleries, is also well-known for his sculptures considering the symbolic relationship between injury and repair. His Berlin Biennale feels like a thesis-driven dive into the collective and individual traumas wrought by modernity.
Set against this beating sense of a foreboding, a pair of canvases by painter Calida Rawles offer a short moment of rest. Yet even these works, depicting Black children gently floating in clear blue water, deal with the trauma of centuries of oppression and the tragedies of the Middle Passage.
Đào Châu Hải, Installation view, 12. Berlin Biennale, Akademie der Künste, Hanseatenweg, 11.6.–18.9.2022. Photo: dotgain.info. Đào Châu Hải, Ballad of the East Sea, (2022).
“Art confronts algorithmic governance by nurturing our ability to dream and enabling us to de-automate dreams,” Attia said in his opening curatorial statement. Yet much of the work confronts disturbing realities. At KW Institute for Contemporary Art, for example, acclaimed Israeli cultural theorist Ariella Azoulay has on view a research work titled The Natural History of Rape, which examines the mass rapes that took place in Berlin after the end of the Second World War. And at the Hamburger Bahnhof, Jean-Jacques Lebel presents documentation of torture from Abu Ghraib prison.
The show also presents several documentary displays in an approach not dissimilar to Cecilia Alemani’s in “The Milk of Dreams” at the 2022 Venice Biennale. But instead of lyrical whimsy, Attia’s time-capsules offer historic books and other artifacts that bring more context to some of the contemporary art on view.
In all, one may leave the exhibition unsettled but wiser—and radicalized to alter the present moment.
The 12th Berlin Biennale takes place from June 11 to September 18, 2022.
Nil Yalter, Installation view, 12. Berlin Biennale, KW Institute for Contemporary Art, 11.6.–18.9.2022. Photo: Silke Briel. From left to right: Nil Yalter, Estranged Doors, (1983). Nil Yalter, Exile Is A Hard Job (1983/2022).
Kruzifixe, Installation view, 12. Berlin Biennale, Akademie der Künste, Pariser Platz, 11.6.–18.9.2022. Photo: dotgain.info.
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For a week in May, the sculpture garden at the National Gallery of Art was the noisiest spot in the U.S. capital.
Each afternoon, a steam-powered carnival organ designed by Kara Walker huffed and puffed on the National Mall, drawing curious crowds. Her piece, The Katastwóf Karavan, is a calliope, a mechanical organ once common on the steam engines that lumbered up and down the Mississippi River. The cacophony is broadcast from a parade wagon wrapped in steel silhouettes depicting the artist’s storybook scenes of antebellum nightmares.
Kara Walker, The Katastwóf Karavan (2017). Installation view: Prospect 4: The Lotus in Spite of the Swamp, New Orleans, 2018. Photo: Alex Marks © Kara Walker.
The sour melody piping from Walker’s contraption cast a spell over onlookers. More so than its traffic-stopping appearance at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2019—more so, even, than its magical debut at the Prospect 4 triennial in New Orleans in 2018—The Karavan’s disruptive, dyspeptic residency in DC marked a turning point for its venue. Walker’s work came to the city as part of “Afro-Atlantic Histories,” a consequential show for one of the most staid institutions in Washington. Perhaps no longer.
“Afro-Atlantic Histories” is like nothing else ever shown before at the National Gallery. With artworks dating from the 1700s to the present moment, it traces the paths of the African diaspora as enslaved peoples arrived in the Americas and pursued their liberation. The exhibition couples collection items alongside contemporary acquisitions as well as Indigenous works, including objects that the National Gallery might not have acknowledged as art only a few years ago. 
For the first time, a museum that has been silent on so many of these fronts in art history—or art histories—has decided to get loud.
The show opens with A Place to Call Home (Africa America Reflection) (2020), a mirror by Hank Willis Thomas shaped like a Western hemisphere from an alternate Earth, with the North American continent tethered to Africa by way of Central America.
The entrance to “Afro-Atlantic Histories” at the National Gallery of Art with Hank Willis Thomas’s A Place to Call Home (Africa America Reflection) (2020) in the background.
This is one of several new acquisitions by the National Gallery for its presentation. Other new permanent-collection works in the show include a totem by Daniel Lind-Ramos of Puerto Rico and a drawing by Njideka Akunyili Crosby of Lagos. A striking, monumental, ebony portrait by Zanele Muholi (Ntozakhe II, (Parktown) from 2016, also new to the collection, can be seen all over town in promotional ads.
Zanele Muholi, Ntozakhe II, (Parktown) (2016). © Zanele Muholi. Courtesy of the artist, Yancey Richardson, New York, and Stevenson Cape Town / Johannesburg.
While these contemporary works are welcome additions for a museum with a laserlike focus on the canon, “Afro-Atlantic Histories” makes its strongest case through 18th- and 19th-century portrait and landscape works. This ought to be firmer territory for the National Gallery, but “Afro-Atlantic Histories” finds the museum on new footing.
Édouard-Antoine Renard’s Slave Rebellion on a Slave Ship (1833) depicts a heroic Black man holding a mighty oar as if it were a baseball bat, the feet of a white slaver decked out beneath him. Nathaniel Jocelyn’s Portrait of Cinqué (1839–40) is a rich contemporaneous portrait of the Mende farmer who led the revolt on the Spanish slave ship La Amistad. Alongside these idealized paintings are more ambivalent scenes, such as George Morland’s European Ship Wrecked on the Coast of Africa (1788–1790), which shows benevolent Africans saving distressed Europeans, as well as Thomas Satterwhite Noble’s The Last Sale of Slaves in St. Louis, Missouri (1880), a picture of social stagnation in the heartland. Fantasy, testimony, and other ideas on view, sometimes side by side, help to ground the concept of competing histories, plural. 
Edouard Antoine Renard, A Slave Rebellion on a Slaveship (1833). La Rochelle, Musée du Noveau Monde, France.
Originally organized by the Museu de Arte de São Paulo and Instituto Tomie Ohtake in Brazil, “Afro-Atlantic Histories” has been adapted for presentations in the U.S. at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (where it was on view from October 2021 to January 2022) and the National Gallery (on view through July 17). From the Museu de Arte come flattened figurative oil paintings by Heitor dos Prazeres of Afro-Brazilian work and play, while the MFAH contributions include paintings on cardboard of Louisiana plantation life by Clementine Hunter. As much as anything else in the show, these self-taught artists challenge and expand the histories that the National Gallery has sought to elevate in the past.
It would not be too strong to say that the National Gallery’s presentation of Black figurative artworks feels contemporary—hip even. The showcase of mid-century paintings by dos Prazeres, Horace Pippin, Hayward Oubre, William H. Johnson and other outlier artists aligns with similar gestures elsewhere, whether that’s Azikiwe Mohammed’s deskilled-looking installation across town at Transformer or Célestin Faustin’s inclusion at this summer’s Venice Biennale. In the art world, there’s always something in the water; the National Gallery is just usually nowhere near it.
Heitor dos Prazeres, Musicians (1950s). Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand.
The shift at the museum starts with staff. At the top of the org chart is Kaywin Feldman, who made “Afro-Atlantic Histories” a priority upon her arrival as director in 2019. She hired Kanitra Fletcher, the museum’s first curator of African American and Afro-diasporic art and organizer for the exhibition’s U.S. tour. (Fletcher also brought the Tate Modern’s “Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power” exhibition to Houston.) In addition, the National Gallery appointed Steven Nelson, professor of African and African American art history at the University of California in Los Angeles, as dean of the museum’s prestigious Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts. Joining them is Eve Straussman-Pflanzer, the new curator and head of Italian and Spanish paintings, among scores of other recent hires.
Appointing a feminist art historian to run the Southern European paintings department or naming a curator to bring the African diaspora into the collection might seem like planting seeds for future growth. But changes are already happening. The National Gallery just acquired a painting of a noblewoman by the 16th-century Mannerist artist Lavinia Fontana, perhaps the West’s first professional woman artist. It picked up a second piece by Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, the first Native American painter in the National Gallery collection. And the museum is aggressively acquiring works by Black artists, among them Genesis Tramaine, Marion Perkins and David Driskell. (The National Gallery would not confirm the acquisitions of Fontana or Perkins.)
This is a reversal from a dismal record that stretches back decades. Recent shows spotlighting Oliver Lee Jackson and Lynda Benglis (curated by Harry Cooper and Molly Donovan, respectively) represent two of just a handful of exhibits by living artists who are women or people of color. The story isn’t much better for marginalized artists of the past.
“Afro-Atlantic Histories” can only tell so much about the National Gallery’s trajectory. It’s not a perfect fit for the museum, or for the U.S. It’s shallow on Afro-Latino artists from Haiti and Cuba: Rigaud Benoit, Wilson Bigaud and Wifredo Lam didn’t make the cut for the U.S. tour. While the exhibit proceeds both thematically and chronologically, by the end, it sprawls. A painting of the Emperor Haile Selassie by Ethiopian painter Alaqa Gabra Selasse, for example, doesn’t seem to fit the theme.
But the show has already demonstrated what a new outlook for the National Gallery could mean for the museum, and for Washington. Incoming U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson toured the exhibition. So did the Obamas. The National Gallery has yet to produce an original show under the imprimatur of its new director, Feldman, but with a startlingly relevant first outing, the museum is already making noise.
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The 21st Serpentine Pavilion designed by artist Theaster Gates will open to the public in London on Friday. Gates is the first non-architect to be awarded the estimable commission, though it was executed with the help of starchitect David Adjaye and associates. The pavilion’s debut will kick off a summer of programming that includes music performances, workshops, and other events clustered around the project.
Titled Black Chapel, the black cylindrical building is an ode to the artist’s late father, who was a roofer, and is also inspired by a breadth of architectural and artistic touchstones including the Rothko Chapel in Houston, the bottle kins that mark the industrial landscape of Stoke-on-Trent in England, Musgum mud huts in Cameroon, and the circular chapels of San Pietro.
Inside, an oculus allows light to bleed into the cavernous space, which is adorned with seven of Gates’s tar paintings, in another homage to his father’s work.
Outside stands a bronze bell the artist salvaged from the site of St. Laurence Catholic Church, which was once a landmark in Chicago’s South Side, where Gates’s Rebuild Foundation is located. The bell “acts as a call to assembly, congregation, and contemplation” while also serving as a reminder of the widespread erasure of these community sites and the people they served.
“The name Black Chapel is important because it reflects the invisible parts of my artistic practice,” Gates said in a statement. “It acknowledges the role that sacred music and the sacred arts have had on my practice, and the collective quality of these emotional and communal initiatives. Black Chapel also suggests that in these times there could be a space where one could rest from the pressures of the day and spend time in quietude.”
See more pictures of Black Chapel below. 
Serpentine Pavilion 2022 designed by Theaster Gates © Theaster Gates Studio. Photo: Iwan Baan. Courtesy: Serpentine.
Serpentine Pavilion 2022 designed by Theaster Gates © Theaster Gates Studio. Photo: Iwan Baan. Courtesy: Serpentine.
Serpentine Pavilion 2022 designed by Theaster Gates © Theaster Gates Studio. Photo: Iwan Baan. Courtesy: Serpentine.
Serpentine Pavilion 2022 designed by Theaster Gates © Theaster Gates Studio. Photo: Iwan Baan. Courtesy: Serpentine.
Theaster Gates. © Rankin Photography.
The Serpentine Pavilion is open every day, 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., from June 10–October 16.
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In the mid-1600s, Brooklyn’s East River was a bustling hub of commerce and an integral part of the network that linked Africa and Europe with the Americas and the Caribbean. It served as a shipping port, maritime harbor, and ferry landing with “finger piers” jutting from the shore where warehouses were built for storage.
Now, the historic area is the site of a group exhibition titled “Black Atlantic,” presented by the Public Art Fund and co-curated by artist Hugh Hayden.
The title of the show is taken from Paul Gilroy’s book Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Like the book, the show is intended to “illustrate a counterpoint to a monolithic perception of Blackness, and is reflective of the multitude of ways in which individuals can create a new vision within the context of American culture that is expansive, malleable and open to all.”
The five artists included in the show—Leilah Babirye, Hugh Hayden, Dozie Kanu, Tau Lewis, and Kiyan Williams—are all roughly of the same generation, their distinct experiences inform a wide range of identities, all of which come through in their sculptural commissions.

Babirye’s hulking nine-foot-tall sculptures titled Agali Awamu (Togetherness) are made from hollowed tree trunks fused with found objects and welded metal, creating the effect of Transformer-like totems harkening back to the artist’s West African upbringing. Babirye fled her native Uganda to escape homophobic persecution, and the black-colored monumental sculptures, which echo the high-rise architecture of New York City, represent “a chosen, queer family, whose visibility in public space is a beacon of empowerment.”
Williams’s work, Ruins of Empire, reflects on the surrounding landmarks, specifically the Statue of Liberty and its forebear in Washington, D.C., the Statue of Freedom, which was erected and constructed by enslaved people during theCivil War. Williams’s vision is partially buried in the ground, a relic of American idealism, which is inextricably linked to subjugation.
Below, see pictures of all the artworks included in “Black Atlantic” at Brooklyn Bridge Park. The show is on view through November 27, 2022. 
Tau Lewis, We pressed our bellies together and kicked our feet, we became something so alien that we no longer had natural predators; We watched humankind evolve as we absorbed into the sea floor, the moon stared down at us and told us the Earth had a heavy heart; We wondered if the angels had abandoned us, or if they simply changed shape without letting us know. Every night creatures vanished, every morning strangers would arrive, (all 2022). Courtesy of the artist and Night Gallery. Photo: Nicholas Knight. Courtesy of Public Art Fund.
Leilah Babirye, Agali Awamu (Togetherness) (2022). Courtesy of the artist, Robichaux, NY, and Stephen Friedman Gallery, London. Photo: Nicholas Knight, Courtesy of Public Art Fund NY.
Dozie Kanu, On Elbows (2022). Courtesy of the artist and Project Native Informant, London. Photo: Nicholas Knight. Courtesy Public Art Fund.
Hugh Hayden, The Gulf Stream (2022). Courtesy of the artist and Lisson Gallery. Photo: Nicholas Knight, Courtesy of Public Art Fund, NY.
Hugh Hayden, The Gulf Stream (2022). Courtesy of the artist and Lisson Gallery. Photo: Nicholas Knight, Courtesy of Public Art Fund, NY.
Tau Lewis, We pressed our bellies together and kicked our feet, we became something so alien that we no longer had natural predators; We watched humankind evolve as we absorbed into the sea floor, the moon stared down at us and told us the Earth had a heavy heart; We wondered if the angels had abandoned us, or if they simply changed shape without letting us know. Every night creatures vanished, every morning strangers would arrive, (all 2022). Courtesy of the artist and Night Gallery. Photo: Nicholas Knight. Courtesy of Public Art Fund.
Kiyan Williams, Ruins of Empire (2022). Courtesy of the artist. Photo: Nicholas Knight, Courtesy of Public Art Fund, NY.
Leilah Babirye, Agali Awamu (Togetherness) (2022). Courtesy of the artist, Robichaux, NY, and Stephen Friedman Gallery, London. Photo: Nicholas Knight, Courtesy of Public Art Fund NY.
Dozie Kanu, On Elbows (2022). Courtesy of the artist and Project Native Informant, London. Photo: Nicholas Knight. Courtesy Public Art Fund.
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There may be only 24 artists, but the stage to showcase their creations is likely to be one of the world’s biggest: the magnificent Dolomite mountain range in northeastern Italy, a UNESCO World Heritage site with 18 peaks as high as 10,000 feet. Yet the breathtaking landscape is more than just the stage; it is also a backdrop, and a source of inspiration for a range of poetic artworks reflecting on the complex relations between humans and the natural environment.
“In many cases, you see a mountain or a piece of land literally holding the work,” said Serpentine Gallery ecology advisor Lucia Pietroiusti, who co-curated this year’s Gherdëina Biennale with writer and curator Filipa Ramos. Artworks on show are scattered across various venues in Val Gardena, in the heart of the Dolomites.
“This is not a biennale of 240 artists. There are 24 practices. You are not looking at curatorial visions. We have some hints and conversations, but it’s the narrative of the artists themselves, and the context that holds them,” Pietroiusti said.
Eduardo Navarro, Spathiphyllum Auris (2022). Photo: Tiberio Sorvillo.
Family Business
Despite being in its eighth edition, the Gherdëina Biennale appears to be the art world’s best-kept secret. Most of the foreign journalists and critics who attended the opening events said they had never heard of the biennale before.
According to gallerist Doris Ghetta, the show began in 2008 as a parallel exhibition to Manifesta 7, with just five artists. It has expanded gradually over time, and now operates with a €450,000 ($478,957) budget funded by local authorities and through sponsorships.
The goal, Ghetta said, was “to introduce them to our culture, arts and crafts, languages” and to “give artists the possibility to develop something specific.”
Angelo Plessas, The Hand of the Noosphere (2022). Photo: Tiberio Sorvillo.
Some of the participating artists in this edition were brought to the region on research trips over the past year to meet local craftspeople, members of the artistic community, and historians and experts in geology, the natural environment, and mythology.
Each artist went home with knowledge and connections to create works telling stories of the region, while exploring the possibilities human coexistence with nature. The artists also bonded with each other, forming an intricate network among themselves that mirrors that of the deep roots of trees and plants populating the mountain range. But not all the works on view are new: there are also paintings by the late Etel Adnan and installation works by Jimmie Durham, who died as the exhibition was being organized.
“The dynamic in which everything happened was much more organic,” said Argentinian artist Eduardo Navarro, who mounted a gigantic sculpture titled Spathiphyllum Auris at the foot of the Dolomites. “Since there was a lack of bureaucracy, it is as if my family was helping me. My family has always been very supportive, in an organic and a very loving way. And this biennale reminds me of that energy.”
At left, Kyriaki Goni’s installation and video work, The mountain-islands shall mourn us eternally (data garden dolomites) (2022). Photo: Tiberio Sorvillo.
Memories of the Mountains
Navarro’s 26-foot-tall, 11,000-pound flower sculpture may be made of concrete, but the artist tried to strip away as many human-made architectural elements as possible. And still, there is a little door on one side that allows visitors to enter and sit inside the belly of the flower, to take a moment to meditate on the sound and energy channeled by the surroundings.
“When you see a flower, the flower is observing itself, through you,” Navarro said. “You cannot separate things from the universe.”
The region’s geological history has also inspired Greek artist Kyriaki Goni, who created a video work titled The mountain-islands shall mourn us eternally (data garden dolomites), in which a non-human voice posing as a hybrid indigenous plant addresses humanity about its history, and as an oracle foretells the grim future of the Earth should climate change continue.
“Place was very much present and important in this biennale,” Goni told Artnet News. “I learned a lot about this place, and this knowledge and experience were infused with the subjects I focus on in my practice.”
Ignota, Memory Garden (2022). Commissioned by the Gherdëina Biennale. Photo: Tiberio Sorvillo.
Spirit, Be With Me
One key element in the show is spirituality: for its commissions, titled Memory Garden and Seeds, the artist collective Igonta (Sarah Shin and Ben Vickers) installed works in a garden that conjure a healing ritual following the moon’s cycle. The artists also performed live rituals on site.
Among the most elaborate works is Alex Cecchetti’s SENTIERO, an intimate performance that involved a three-hour hike up the mountains, led by a performer who acts as a guide. During my visit, the performer guided only one or two audience members each time, reciting poems and stories along the way while offering a helping hand from time to time through challenging trails.
Alex Cecchetti, SENTIERO (2022). Photo: Tiberio Sorvillo.
Upon reaching the top of the mountain, visitors were offered soup and bread made with local ingredients, conveying a sense of gratitude towards the surrounding non-human species inhabiting the mountains.
Cecchetti began developing his work after he first set foot in the area last June, and has walked the path multiple times through different seasons.
“The path is conceived as life itself,” the artist said. “I wanted a shift. I wanted everyone to feel the immortality of life through the dissolving of their individuality. We are nature—we are nature as much as a tree. We cannot be disconnected.”
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It has been just over a year since Tracey Emin was given the all clear from bladder cancer. Following a period of recovery from an extensive surgery, the artist is finally out of bed. So far out of bed, in fact, that I had to trek across a forest in Scotland to meet her.
We met at Jupiter Artland, where Emin has just opened an exhibition originally slated for 2020 but was delayed—first because of the pandemic and then because she was unwell. The artist was in good form as she posed for photographs perched atop a monumental bronze figure that is being permanently installed in the woodland of the 120-acre sculpture park owned by collectors Nicky and Robert Wilson.
The exhibition (through October 2) takes its title from the bronze, I Lay Here for You, a female figure lying on her front, hand disappearing between her thighs. Emin chose the site for the work, which is slanted on a hill, its undulations echoed in the forms of the bronze. It feels like a private scene, but the title adds another layer, suggesting the figure lies in wait, which opens up themes of loneliness, and the human longing for partnership.
Tracey Emin. Photo by Naomi Rea.
Emin has always been good at carving open spaces to talk about difficult subjects. Her unflinching autobiographical work gives voice to the experience of being a woman, from discovering sexual pleasure to meeting forces that threaten that bodily autonomy, such as sexual violence, shaming, access to abortion, or menopause.
I wondered about how the sculpture would play with school trips to Jupiter Artland, and how it might open up discussions about masturbation. “It’s kind of useful, isn’t it?” Emin said. “It’s a conversation you don’t really want to have in the classroom. It’s better to have it outside in clear air so the words can go off into the ether, or maybe say nothing and just look at it and think, and it becomes an open subject between friends, then.”
Tracey Emin, The beginning The middle and The end (2022). ©Tracey Emin. All rights reserved, DACS 2020. Photo © White Cube. (Ollie Hammock).
Making and Unmaking the Bed
Emin became famous for her provocative pit of depression now known as My Bed (1999), which exploded her onto the scene with the YBAs. It prompted a nationwide debate about what art is, which—as I was reminded by a conversation with my taxi driver on the way out of the sculpture park—continues to this day.
Though Emin’s practice has evolved far beyond the bed over the past two decades, she has returned to the subject among the array of paintings, sculpture, and hand-painted monographs on view in the exhibition.
In one small painting, Empty Heart, a bed far different from her infamous messy tangle appears, this one pristine, awash in pastel hues. It was the last painting she made before moving out of her old apartment in Fitzrovia, London, after 20 years—she now mostly lives in her seaside hometown of Margate—and after her cancer diagnosis. “It was about leaving, and it was about death as well,” Emin told me. “If I died, everything would have been empty.”
In a new series of monotypes made during her recovery, the bed motif recurs, but this time it is full of life. When she was ill, the gallerist Carl Freedman (also her next door neighbor in Margate, and a former lover) printed off a series of lithographs of the outline of her bed to help ease her back into work. “So I could have a starting place, and I didn’t have to think ‘oh what am I going to draw?’” Emin said. “I could just draw on the bed.”
Tracey Emin, Empty Heart (2021). Installation view, “I Lay Here For You,” Jupiter Artland. Photo by Naomi Rea.
Emin worked over the lithographs with Indian ink to produce a series of sexy works that she said draw from “wonderful memories” and are about someone who helped her through difficult moments after her surgery, without getting more specific than that. Some are overtly erotic, sexual scenes paired with poetic, confessional, titles like You just kept wanting me. In others, the title jars emotionally with the physical intimacy depicted: a couple spooning, the female figure turned away; Of course I was Hurt.
Her urostomy bag—a necessity since the cancer surgery removed her bladder, womb, and half of her vagina—makes several appearances. Emin doesn’t shy away from addressing her physical challenges, and emotional hurdles too. She has recently been grappling with a change in how society treats her as she approaches 60 years old.
“I haven’t had children, but I think [menopause] is a lot worse in terms of pain and misery and suffering,” she said. “At least when you give birth, you have a child. After menopause you just have less, and less, and less, and less. It’s the beginning of the end.”
The same air of wistfulness that accompanies the bronze outdoors permeates these works. “They are sad, some of them, and it is also a sad story: I’m not lucky in love, and there’s nothing I can do about it. I just have to accept it as it is,” she said, adding, with a twinge of bitterness: “If I was a man I’d still be a catch. I have quite a lot going for me, I think. But as a woman, it doesn’t work that way.”
Tracey Emin, Because I’m so Fucking sexy. I was born sexy And I will die sexy (2022). Installation view, “I Lay Here For You,” Jupiter Artland. Photo by Naomi Rea.
As our words wandered in this direction, I felt like shaking her. You’re Tracey Fucking Emin! But where she could have collapsed into self-pity, the conversation turned around. Her confrontation with the cancer also forced her to tackle a deep-seated drinking problem. Now recovered, she has found an emotional level-headedness which has opened up exciting new possibilities in life as in art.
“If someone thinks that my sexuality is what is between my legs, then they’re wrong,” she said. “I’ve got an amazing imagination, and I’m full of fecundity. I’m alive.”
This attitude comes to fruit in one of the most powerful monotypes, titled Because I’m so Fucking sexy. I was born sexy And I will die sexy. In it, Emin appears as a lone figure, filling the bed, reclaiming her sexual self.
Installation view, “Tracey Emin: I Lay Here For You,” Jupiter Artland. Photo by Keith Hunter.
Legacy Making
Emin’s personal emotional development has coincided with a critical reassessment of her career, and belated recognition of work that was dismissed when it was first made.
In recent years, her paintings have been shown alongside those of Edvard Munch; My Bed has been shown with JMW Turner, and people are coming around to some of her more challenging film works. One haunting film on view in Scotland, which is not technically part of the exhibition but a recent acquisition from the owners of the sculpture park, can be heard from the forest. In the 1998 Super 8 film Homage to Edvard Munch and all my dead children Emin is curled up, naked, on the jetty outside Munch’s studio in Oslo, wailing.
“As an artist, it’s been really difficult for me. I think a lot of people misjudged me, got me wrong,” Emin said. “But I think I feel slowly things are changing for me. People are starting to realize that I wasn’t a screaming banshee. I actually was making some really good points.”
Still, not everyone has come around. While she is now a towering figure in British art, who has shown in major museums around the world, Emin has yet to get proper recognition in the U.S. Barring one show of neon works at MOCA North Miami, Emin has never had a solo exhibition at an American museum. She puts it down to the conservative powers that be in the U.S. museum world. “The board is never going to clear my work,” she said. “It’s never going to happen.”
She has felt left out of certain group shows too, including political art shows where she said her abstract, emotional work has been passed over for those that favor figurative, direct statements. “They say my work is not political,” she said. “Give me a show in Texas and tell me whether my work’s political. Go on.”
Tracey Emin, This is exactly how I feel right now (2016). Installation view, “I Lay Here For You,” Jupiter Artland. Photo by Naomi Rea.
Elsewhere, she is being recognized through a slew of shows including a solo at Carl Freedman gallery in Margate, and besides Scotland, permanent works are being installed in Israel, and her Sphinx-like, 30-foot-tall, 18.2 ton sculpture The Mother is about to be unveiled outside the Munch Museum in Oslo.
Back on home soil, she is setting up her own free-to-attend art school in Margate to give opportunity to those who might otherwise have been deprived, and where she intends to pass on her wisdom. “I’ll teach people how to make a living out of their art so they don’t have to do cleaning jobs if they don’t want to,” she said. All this, and making plans to open up her studio complex as a museum after she dies, has her thinking about legacy.
The permanent bronze works going into the ground give her a sense of validation she hasn’t felt during the fleeting periods of fame that have punctuated her career. “They’re not going anywhere,” she said. And for now, armed with a clean bill of health and emotional steadiness, neither is Emin. 
“Tracey Emin: I Lay Here For You” is on view through October 2 at Jupiter Artland, Wilkieston, Scotland.
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