Tracey Emin - How It Feels

Malba – Fundación Costantini is pleased to announce Tracey Emin: How It Feels. Curated by Philip Larratt-Smith, this exhibition is the first to focus on the artist's early video work as well as the first museum-level presentation in the Americas.

Tracey Emin (b. 1963, London) began making videos in the 1990s, when she was an emerging artist among what later came to be known as the YBAs (Young British Artists). She distinguished herself from her peers right away for her masterful ability to tell the story of her own life with clarity and brutal honesty. Intensely personal and emotional, Emin's work has an immediacy and authenticity that is unique among contemporary artists. In the words of the curator: "Taken as a whole, her output amounts to an attempt to capture the flow of lived experience. The various mediums in which she works allow her to be conscious and self-reflective on one hand and totally uninhibited on the other."

The five videos in How It Feels (Why I Never Became a Dancer, 1995; How It Feels, 1996; Riding for a Fall, 1998; Homage to Edvard Munch and All My Dead Children, 1998; and Love Is a Strange Thing, 2000) have been selected with a view to highlighting the full range of Emin's voice, which is by turns romantic, disabused, vulgar, and humorous. The lyrical beauty and poetic mood of her imagery is balanced out by the exploration of taboo subject matter, which Emin discusses with her trademark candour: her early discovery of sex, her abortions, gender politics, and class structures. The unique combination of assured performance and exhibitionistic acting out that defines her artistic production and public persona, and that later fuelled her rise to a celebrity status that is unmatched by any other living British artist, is on full display in these seminal works. 

On the occasion of this exhibition, Malba will publish a major catalogue — with the collaboration of British Council — that offers the first in-depth exploration of Emin's video work. Available in Spanish and English editions, the catalogue features the curator's essay ("Mighty Real: A Hysteric in the Age of Pop Conceptualism"), an appreciation by artist and author Fernanda Laguna ("What There Is"), a conversation between Emin and Larratt-Smith amply illustrated with images of Emin's life and work, and a full-colour plate section and transcripts of the films.


Curated by Philip Larratt-Smith

Tracey Emin
How It Feels
Kurator: Philip Larratt-Smith